Political Protest and Dissent in the Khrushchev Era
Robert Hornsby
A thesis submitted to
the University of Birmingham
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Russian and East European Studies
European Research Institute
The University of Birmingham
December 2008
University of Birmingham Research Archive
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ABSTRACT
This thesis addresses the subject of political dissent during the Khrushchev era. It
examines the kinds of protest behaviours that individuals and groups engaged in and
the way that the Soviet authorities responded to them.
The findings show that
dissenting activity was more frequent and more diverse during the Khrushchev period
than has previously been supposed and that there were a number of significant
continuities in the forms of dissent, and the authorities’ responses to these acts, across
the eras of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In the early Khrushchev years a large
proportion of the political protest and criticism that took place remained essentially
loyal to the regime and Marxist-Leninist in outlook, though this declined in later years
as communist utopianism and respect for the ruling authorities seem to have
significantly diminished. In place of mass terror, the authorities increasingly moved
toward more rationalised and targeted practices of social control, seeking to ‘manage’
dissent rather than to eradicate it either by persuasion or by force. All of this was
reflective of the fact that the relationship between state and society was undergoing a
vital transitional stage during the Khrushchev years, as both parties began to establish
for themselves what had and had not changed since Stalin’s death.
.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr Jeremy Smith, Dr Melanie Ilič
and Dr Alex Titov. All three have been remarkably generous with their time, advice
and encouragement. Other members of CREES who have proved a great help over
the past three years include Mike Berry, Nigel Hardware, Marea Arries and Patricia
Carr.
All of my postgraduate colleagues have contributed in some way toward
making my studies more enjoyable and productive, though Sean Roberts and Ulrike
Ziemer deserve special mention, not least for providing me with a place to stay on my
last few visits to Birmingham.
All of my interviewees gave their time generously and contributed a great deal to the
project and I am very grateful to all of them Long periods of archival research in
Moscow were made all the more enjoyable by the presence of fellow researchers Bob
Henderson and Siobhan Peeling.
Mila and Galina Kosterina were particularly
generous in their hospitality during my final trip to Russia.
Outside of academia I have also benefited from the support of many people whilst
researching and writing this thesis. Among those who have kept me from becoming
entirely consumed by my work are Kevin Leedham, James Glossop and Stephen
Taylor. In particular, I owe a large debt of gratitude to Thetis Abela and Lyndon
Gallagher for all the help they have provided over the past few years.
Most
importantly, I would like to thank my parents John and Norma Hornsby for their
never-ending support and encouragement.
Finally, I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board for their
financial support that made the whole project possible.
iii
CONTENTS
List of Tables
ix
Transliteration
x
Glossary
xi
INTRODUCTION
1
0.1 LITERATURE REVIEW
4
0.2 DEFINITION OF TERMS
11
0.3 PARAMETERS OF THE STUDY
17
0.4 SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
21
0.5 STRUCTURE OF THESIS
28
CHAPTER 1 PROTEST AND DISSENT, 1956-1958
31
1.1 DISSENT PRIOR TO THE SECRET SPEECH
33
1.1.1 The Stalin Years
34
1.1.2 The Collective Leadership
36
1.2 THE XX CONGRESS AND ITS AFTERMATH
38
1.2.1 Discussions of the Secret Speech
39
1.2.2 The Thermo-Technical Institute
44
1.2.3 Marxism-Leninism
48
1.2.4 Pro-Stalin Dissent
50
1.3 AMNESTIES AND PRISONERS
52
1.3.1 Released Prisoners
53
1.3.2 The Influence of Returnees
55
1.3.3 Serving Prisoners
59
iv
1.4 THE HUNGARIAN RISING
62
1.4.1 Student Protest
64
1.4.2 Open Criticism Within the CPSU
67
1.4.3 Dissent in the Komsomol
69
1.4.4 Forms of Dissenting Activity
73
1.4.5 Spontaneous Outbursts
75
1.5 UNDERGROUND DISSENTING ACTIVITY
80
1.5.1 Anti-Soviet Leaflets
81
1.5.2 Anonymous Letters
83
1.5.3 Underground Groups
87
1.6 CONCLUSIONS
92
CHAPTER 2 OFFICIAL RESPONSES TO DISSENT, 1956-1958
95
RESPONSES TO DISSENT PRIOR TO THE XX CONGRESS
98
2.1.1 The Public Face of Political Persecution
98
2.1.2 From the Revolution to the Secret Speech
100
2.2 AFTER THE XX CONGRESS
104
2.2.1 Responding to Discussions of the Secret Speech
105
2.2.2 The Thermo-Technical Institute: Revisited
108
2.2.3 The Boundaries of Permissible and Impermissible
111
2.2.4 Restoring Discipline in the Party
114
2.2.5 Restoring Discipline in the Komsomol
117
2.3 THE DECEMBER LETTER
123
2.3.1 Fears over Hungary
124
2.3.2 Formulating the Letter
127
2.3.3 The Final Text
129
v
2.4 THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST DISSENT
132
2.4.1 Convictions under Article 58-10
133
2.4.2 Grounds for Arrest and Conviction
135
2.4.3 Legal Processes
141
2.5 WINDING DOWN THE CAMPAIGN
147
2.5.1 The Procurator Review
149
2.5.2 The Supreme Court
151
2.6 CONCLUSIONS
154
CHAPTER 3 PROTEST AND DISSENT, 1959-1964
157
3.1 OPPOSITION TO KHRUSHCHEV
160
3.1.1 Early Attacks on Khrushchev
161
3.1.2 ‘Bringing Disgrace Upon the Country’
162
3.1.3 The Khrushchev Cult
167
3.1.4 Khrushchev’s Character
170
3.1.5 Legitimacy
173
3.2 THE OUTSIDE WORLD
176
3.2.1 Living Standards
177
3.2.2 Western Radio Broadcasts
180
3.2.3 NTS
182
3.2.4 Communicating with the West
185
3.2.5 Chinese Anti-Soviet Agitation
187
3.3 UNDERGROUND ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY 1960s
190
3.3.1 Growing Disillusionment
191
3.3.2 1962-1963
196
vi
3.4 MASS DISORDERS
199
3.4.1 Disturbances in the Late 1950s
201
3.4.2 Disturbances in the Early 1960s
202
3.4.3 Novocherkassk
204
3.5 A PRECURSOR TO THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT
208
3.5.1 Mayakovsky Square
209
3.5.2 Samizdat
213
3.5.3 The Legalist Approach
214
3.5.4 Khrushchev and the Liberal Intelligentsia
217
3.5.5 Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel
220
3.6 CONCLUSIONS
223
CHAPTER 4 OFFICIAL RESPONSES TO DISSENT, 1959-1964.
226
4.1 POLICING DISSENT
227
4.1.1 The Leadership
228
4.1.2 The Work of the KGB
232
4.1.3 Centralisation
236
4.1.4 Policing the Mayakovsky Square Meetings
240
4.2 PROPHYLAXIS
243
4.2.1 Media Attacks on Dissenters
245
4.2.2 The Role of Society
252
4.2.3 Preventing Future Uprisings
254
4.2.4 The Prophylactic Chat
256
4.3 CAMPS AND PRISONS
261
4.3.1 The Legal System
261
4.3.2 Deteriorating Conditions
266
vii
4.3.3 Rehabilitation
269
4.4 PUNITIVE PSYCHIATRY
275
4.4.1 The Party Leadership and Punitive Psychiatry
277
4.4.2 Processes and Conditions
281
4.5 CONCLUSIONS
287
CONCLUSION
290
5.1 KHRUSHCHEV AND THE KHRUSHCHEV ERA
291
5.2 STATE AND SOCIETY
298
5.3 CHANGE AND CONTINUITY
303
5.4 FUTURE RESEARCH
308
APPENDICES
Appendix 1: Annual Convictions for Political Crimes
310
Appendix 2: List of Interviewees
312
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Unpublished Primary Sources
314
Published Primary Sources
315
Newspapers
319
Published Secondary Sources
320
viii
LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1 Annual expulsions from the Ukrainian Komsomol, 1956-1958.
Table 2.2 Annual expulsions from the Kazakh and Uzbek Komsomol organisations,
1955-1957.
Table 2.3 Annual sentences for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda, 1956-1964.
Table 2.4 Distribution of sentences for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda by union
republic in 1957.
Table 2.5 Length of sentences for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda in the period
1956-1957
ix
TRANSLITERATION
The British Standard system of transliteration has been used throughout this work, but
with some exceptions in regard to place names and people whose names have an
‘accepted’ English spelling. For example, the text refers to Ludmilla Alexeyeva
rather than Lyudmilla Alekseeva on the basis that it is the former spelling under
which her works have been published in the English language. Where there has been
any uncertainty in regard to what is ‘accepted’ I have employed the British Standard
system.
x
GLOSSARY
Aktiv – Communist Party activists
ASSR – Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic
CPSU – The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kommunisticheskaya partiya
Sovetskogo Soyuza)
Gorkom – City Party Committee
KGB – The State Security Committee (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti)
Kolkhoz – A collective farm
Komsomol – The Communist Youth League
Memorial – a Russian charitable organisation that investigates and publicises abuses
of human rights under the Soviet regime and since.
MVD – The Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del)
NKVD – The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi komissariat
vnutrennikh del)
Obkom – Oblast’ Party Committee
Oblast’ – An administrative division used in the USSR and present-day Russia,
meaning ‘province’ or ‘region’
Raion – An administrative division used in the USSR and present-day Russia,
meaning ‘area’ or ‘district’
RSFSR – The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
Samizdat – Self-published literature. Printed and distributed by clandestine means.
Sovkhoz – A state farm
SSR – Soviet Socialist Republic
Stilyagi – Young Soviet citizens who were characterised by a love of Western culture
and fashions
xi
INTRODUCTION
Viewing conflict between authority and society as part of a cycle of events that had
existed in Russia since the time of Peter the Great, the historian Marshall Shatz
likened the dissent of the post-Stalin era to the major peasant rebellions of Tsarist
times. 1 When this analogy is applied to the Khrushchev period we can see that in
some respects Shatz was correct: much dissenting activity in those years was
ephemeral, uncoordinated and occupied a politically ambiguous position in regard to
the ruling regime. In other respects he was wrong, however. Dissenting behaviour
under Khrushchev usually involved either lone individuals or very small groups that
were quickly neutralised and there were no charismatic or renowned leaders – though
numerous dissenters from the period later went on to play a prominent role in the
Brezhnev era human rights movement.
Unlike in later years, there was no ‘dissident movement’ that one could speak of, yet
thousands of citizens expressed varying gradations of disappointment, anger and
opposition to the political authorities. These expressions could take many forms, such
as public speeches attacking state policies, leaflets calling for specific leaders to be
expelled from the Party or the formation of underground groups that plotted uprisings
and called for workers to take mass strike action. That the Khrushchev period was a
time of great political change and upheaval has been widely recognised by historians,
1
M. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, p.
10. Presumably the peasant rebellions that Shatz had in mind included those led by Ivan Bolotnikov
(1606-1607), Stenka Razin (1670-1671) and Emel’yan Puagchev (1773-1774). Each of these uprisings
flared violently and enjoyed a degree of popular support but was ultimately defeated by government
forces.
1
yet the extent to which this was a time of considerable social volatility and ideological
non-conformism has largely been overlooked.
In addressing the topic of political dissent during the Khrushchev era, this thesis
touches upon a number of subjects that are integral to the way in which we view
Soviet history, such as popular adherence to communist ideology and the relationship
between the state and society, as well as the more general theme of resistance to
authority. As distinct from many other studies on Soviet dissent, the present work
also examines the policies and practices that were utilised by the Soviet regime in its
struggle against protest and criticism. This means that although this is primarily a
study of dissent in particular, it is also very much a thesis about the Khrushchev era in
general.
There are three broad aims to this thesis. The first is to provide an outline of the most
important themes, debates and processes involved in political dissent and the official
responses to them. Expanding upon this, the second aim is then to draw out themes of
change and continuity across the periods of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev in
regard to the actions of dissenters and the authorities. The third and final aim is to
address the question of what all of this tells us about the relationship between state
and society during the Khrushchev era.
As a theme that has not yet been subjected to a great deal of rigorous academic
scrutiny, the main goal of the present work is to fill this particular gap in the
historiography of the Soviet period. In doing so, it firstly demonstrates that political
protest and criticism were significantly more prevalent and more diverse during the
2
Khrushchev period than is widely supposed and sketches an outline of the most
important subjects in regard to acts of political protest and criticism.
The thesis then seeks to fill the concomitant ‘gap’ in regard to how the regime
responded to dissenting behaviour in the Khrushchev years – a field that has drawn
even less academic attention. It shows that characterisations of the Khrushchev years
as a time of ‘thaw’ and of Khrushchev himself as a relative liberal are not entirely
suitable when examined through the medium of the state’s responses to dissenting
behaviour during his time as Soviet leader. It is also possible to gain some valuable
insights into policy formation, evolution and implementation as well centre-periphery
relations and the ongoing power struggles at the highest levels of the regime.
In terms of change and continuity across different periods of Soviet history one can
see that although there were some major dislocations with the regime’s Stalinist past
there were also many continuations with it. Punitive policy against dissenters steadily
evolved away from Stalinism rather than broke with it entirely after Stalin’s death in
March 1953 and was still evolving for some time after the XX CPSU Congress in
February 1956. Among the most important themes in the latter part of the thesis is the
trend of continuity between the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras in regard to both
dissenting behaviour and the authorities’ responses. In this one can also see how
pragmatism and rationalism rather than ideology (i.e. Khrushchev’s much-vaunted
‘return to Leninism’) or a sense of liberality set the agenda in dealing with the
problem of dissent and that although at times its assumptions were based on
fundamentally sound reasoning, the regime consistently exaggerated the threat posed
to the state by dissenting behaviour and often overreacted to it as a result.
3
Factors that are highlighted in regard to the changing relationship between state and
society include evidence of people’s broadening philosophical horizons, declining
respect for, and fear of, the authorities along with the gradual emergence of the tacit
Brezhnev era social contract between society and the regime (whereby society
remained docile as long as the regime fulfilled basic tasks such as providing
employment and an acceptable standard of living). One can also see that after the
isolation of the Stalin years both the regime and society were increasingly affected by
events and powers outside of the USSR.
0.1 LITERATURE REVIEW
Ever since the January 1966 trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel brought the
Soviet regime’s domestic critics to the attention of Western journalists and academics,
a reasonably substantial body of work has arisen on the theme of dissent and
dissenters. 2 However, very little academic study has addressed the subject of dissent
during the preceding Khrushchev era.
This is perhaps unsurprising when one
considers that very little information reached the outside world, or even wider Soviet
society, in regard to dissenting behaviour prior to the mid 1960s. The last few years
have witnessed something of an upsurge in academic interest in the Khrushchev
period and, to a slightly lesser extent, there has also been a revival of interest in the
2
Sinyavsky and Daniel had been arrested and were subsequently jailed after secretly transmitting a
series of satirical works to the West, where they were published under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz
and Nikolai Arzhak respectively. The trial against the pair, and events surrounding it, are generally
acknowledged as marking the first stages of the Soviet human rights movement. As such, practically
all works on Soviet dissent go into some detail on the subject. The case against them is raised in more
detail toward the end of this thesis.
4
history of the Soviet dissident movement, yet there has so far been minimal
convergence between the two. 3
In order to illustrate the way in which commentators have previously depicted dissent
during the Khrushchev era it is useful to cite three separate authors. In 1972 Cornelia
Gerstenmaier wrote that ‘for about a decade, during the mid 50s and early 60s, hostile
political currents found expression almost exclusively in literary works’. 4 In 1987
Ludmilla Alexeyeva described dissent in the Khrushchev era as ‘an incubation period
when people began to learn to talk about the problems of Soviet life’. 5 Most recently,
in 2002, Erik Kulavig pointed out that ‘the opening of archives has shown dissidence
to be prevalent far below the intelligentsia level’. 6 Clearly then, the passing years
have seen a slightly more developed picture of dissent being established, yet even
Kulavig’s remark only hints at just how unexplored this field has so far remained.
It is important to flag up Kulavig’s work, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine
Stories about Disobedient Russians. It is the only volume in the English language
which has yet purported to tackle the same subject as this thesis, yet its similarities
with the present study are surprisingly limited. Although it presents some useful data
and valuable avenues for further exploration, Dissent in the Khrushchev Era is a
3
Of the recent scholarly literature on the Khrushchev era, three of the most notable works include W.
Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2003; R. Medvedev and Zh.
Medvedev, Nikita Khrushchev: Otets ili otchim sovetskoi ‘ottepeli’, Moskva: Yauza, 2006; P. Jones ed.
The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London:
Routledge, 2006. Impressive recent works on the Soviet dissident movement have included P.
Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 2005; R. Horvath,
The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia,
London: Routledge, 2005.
4
C. Gerstenmaier, The Voices of the Silent, New York: Hart Publishing Company, 1972, p. 32.
5
L. Alexeyeva, . Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human
Rights, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. 269.
6
E. Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient Russians,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 15.
5
rather limited and unsatisfying study. One reviewer labelled it as ‘frustrating as much
as enlightening’ and justifiably argued that several of its chapters have ‘little to do
with dissent or disobedience’. 7 This is a judgement from which the present work does
not demur.
The most notable work of recent times on this subject is a 2005 Russian-language
volume edited by Vladimir Kozlov and Sergei Mironenko entitled Kramola:
Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 1953-1982 (Subversion: Nonconformism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, 1953-1982). 8 Using archival sources
drawn from the files of the Soviet Procurator, the pair have reproduced a number of
anti-Soviet leaflets and letters from the period as well as detailing the activities of
numerous underground groups. This will perhaps prove to be a seminal work on
dissent, and will apparently be translated into English in the near future, yet its focus
does differ somewhat from the present work – most notably in the fact that it draws on
a smaller range of sources and looks only at dissenting behaviour and not at official
responses.
Furthermore, the bulk of Kozlov and Mironenko’s work consists of
reproductions of documents rather than commentary and analysis.
In regard to the subject of Soviet dissent in general, Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s 1987 work
Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights
undoubtedly remains the touchstone. It presents an authoritative overview of the
many different struggles that existed within the USSR, and, where appropriate, shows
how these struggles related to each other. However, like most other works on dissent,
7
T. Friedgut, ‘Review of Dissent in the Years of Khruhchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient
Russians’, Slavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 419-420.
8
V. Kozlov and S. Mironenko eds, Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 19531982, Moskva: ‘Materik’, 2005.
6
its focus lies overwhelmingly upon the events of the Brezhnev era. 9 Covering a
subject which is both thematically and chronologically narrower than that tackled by
Alexeyeva, the present work seeks to present a more detailed and nuanced picture of a
considerably less wide-ranging subject.
Where this thesis ties in with previous works and seeks to build on them is by
presenting a more detailed and analytical - as opposed to narrative - account of
dissenting behaviour under Khrushchev. It shows that Gerstenmaier was wrong to
argue that there was little or no political criticism outside of the literary sphere and
that Alexeyeva was correct to see the Khrushchev period as a formative time for the
subsequent dissident movement. It demonstrates how and why this was the case as
well as showing that there was a considerably greater range of dissenting behaviour in
the Khrushchev years than Alexeyeva’s remarks acknowledge. Kulavig’s assertion
that dissent existed below intelligentsia level is supported and significantly enhanced
with a sizable volume of evidence. In other words, the present work seeks to expand
our understanding of a period that has so far been covered with essentially correct but
overly simplistic depictions.
One of the main reasons why many previous works have either provided simplistic
depictions of dissent in the Khrushchev era or largely overlooked the period was the
context in which they were produced. The vast majority of studies on Soviet dissent
were written during the Cold War period. This meant that they were perhaps shaped
by the politically charged atmosphere of the time. Importantly, studies on dissent
9
Other volumes on Soviet dissent that have largely focussed upon the Brezhnev era include J.
Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, Boston: Beacon Press, 1980; A.
Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime 1953-1970, Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1972.
7
from the Cold War era were also written without access to the kind of archival sources
that inform the present work. While one must be careful not to accept these sources
unquestioningly or to present an entirely bureaucratic picture of events by overreliance on official documents, they undoubtedly do help to build a more detailed
picture.
Furthermore, it is also important to acknowledge that this ‘first generation’ of research
on Soviet dissent was written almost exclusively by sympathetic parties in the West or
by former dissenters who had emigrated or been exiled from the USSR. 10 It must be
accepted that this was, and to some extent still is, a particularly emotive subject and
one could not suggest that these were entirely impartial chroniclers. The question of
whether historians can ever be truly impartial falls beyond the remit of this thesis,
though it is surely easier to achieve a degree of objectivity today than it was twenty or
thirty years ago. None of this is to suggest that recent research has found earlier
accounts to require a thoroughgoing revision but that they can now be expanded upon
and, in places, challenged.
Another theme that one encounters in looking at the way in which dissent has often
been written about in the West is what Ben Nathans has labelled a ‘person-centric
approach to dissent’. 11 This has meant a strong focus on the ideas and works of
prominent individuals, most notably Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or
in Nathans’ case Alexander Esenin-Volpin, rather than looking at wider currents
10
Examples of the former include Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents; A. Axelbank, Soviet Dissent:
Intellectuals, Jews and Détente, New York: Franklin Watts Inc., 1975. Examples of the latter include
P. Grigorenko, Memoirs, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1982; Yu. Orlov, Dangerous
Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991.
11
B. Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights Under
“Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 4, Winter 2007, p. 631.
8
across a particular genre of dissent. 12 While this approach undoubtedly has some
merit for the Brezhnev period, it is one that does not suit the kinds of dissent
witnessed in the Khrushchev period, largely because there were no truly prominent
dissenters or ‘figureheads’ at that time and far more limited philosophical divergences
between dissenters.
This ‘person-centric approach’ is, of course, an unavoidable presence in the memoirs
of former dissenters. In regard to the present study, these memoirs can be categorised
into three groups. The first group consists of works by prominent Brezhnev era
dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov, Andrei Amalrik and Leonid Plyushch. 13 These
occasionally contain useful scraps of information on the Khrushchev period but are of
limited use overall. The second group contains memoirs by the likes of Vladimir
Bukovsky, Yuri Orlov and Petr Grigorenko, which provide a wealth of detail on
specific events from the Khrushchev period yet remain largely focused on the
Brezhnev era. 14 Most useful, and least numerous, are the third group of works which
were written almost exclusively on the Khrushchev years, by individuals such as
Revolt Pimenov, Boris Vail’ and Valery Ronkin – all of whom were active dissenters
during the time in question. 15
12
One can find, for example, multiple biographies on Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn as well as volumes
dedicated to individuals such as Sergei Kovalev and Anatoly Shcharansky. See R. Lourie, Sakharov: A
Biography, London: Brandeis University Press, 2002; M. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, New
York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984; E. Gilligan, Defending Human Rights in Russia: Sergei Kovalev,
Dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969-1996, London: Routledge, 2004; M. Gilbert,
Shcharansky: Hero Of Our Time, London: Macmillan, 1986.
13
See A. Sakharov, Memoirs, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990; A. Amalrik, An Involuntary Journey
to Siberia, Newton Abbot: Readers Union, 1971; L. Plyushch, History’s Carnival: A Dissident’s
Autobiography, London: Harvill Press, 1979.
14
See V. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978; Orlov,
Dangerous Thoughts; Grigorenko, Memoirs.
15
See R. Pimenov, Vospominaniya, Moskva: Informatsionno-ekspertnaya gruppa ‘Panorama’, 1996; B.
Vail’ Osobo opasnyi, London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1980; V. Ronkin Na smenu
dekabryam prikhodit yanvari…, Moskva: Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, 2003.
9
Russian scholarship on dissent has, of course, experienced a markedly different
history to that of Western research. 16 In the Soviet period there was no rigorous
academic study of dissent and instead there were a handful of anti-dissident
propaganda works masquerading as scholarly volumes, such as Nikolai Yakovlev’s
CIA Target: USSR. 17 Running counter to such works was a stream of samizdat
material on dissent from the late 1960s. Although their authors were undoubtedly
some of the most knowledgeable people on the topic, this was itself a genre that ought
not to be accepted without question as offering an accurate or balanced depiction of
events solely on the basis that these were works written by ‘the good guys’.
As Horvath has shown, glasnost’ and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union saw a
major upsurge of interest in dissent and dissidents in Russia and elsewhere across the
former USSR. This interest was initially met by a glut of sensationalist journalism
rather than scholarly research, with the most notable exception being the historians
and enthusiasts working at Memorial. Since that time, Russian scholarship on the
subject has reached particularly high levels of quality and many of the most useful
works of the last decade on the themes of dissent, politics and society in the
Khrushchev period have been written by Russian historians. Foremost among them
are included Vladimir Kozlov, Aleksandr Pyzhikov, Gennadyi Kuzovkin, Elena
Zubkova and Boris Firsov. 18
16
It is worth drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that numerous dissidents’ autobiographies that
were released in English language editions in the West during the 1970s and 1980s have recently been
published for the first time in the Russian language. These include Yu. Orlov, Opsanye mysli:
Memuary iz russkoi zhizni, Moskva: Zakharov, 2008; L. Alekseeva and P. Goldberg, Pokolenie
ottepeli, Moskva: Zakharov, 2006; V. Bukovskii, I vozvrashchaetsya veter…, Moskva: Zakharov, 2007.
17
N. Yakovlev, CIA Target: USSR, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982. The basic premise of
Yakovlev’s work was to assert that dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Yuri Orlov were actually
CIA agents. This was a translation of the mass-market Russian language volume by Yakovlev entitled
TsRU protiv SSSR, Moskva: Molodaya gvardiya, 1979.
18
See Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola; A. Pyzhikov, Opyt modernizatsii sovetskogo obshchestva
v 1953-1964 godakh: obshchestvenno-politicheskii aspekt, Moskva: Izdatel’skii dom ‘Gamma’, 1998;
10
All of these authors have utilised a strong combination of archival material along with
a wealth of other primary and secondary sources to produce works of a very high
standard.
What these works and others have consistently demonstrated is a
willingness to question and cast doubt upon the occasionally exaggerated Western
view of the Khrushchev years as a time of liberalisation and of dissenters as
opponents of communism – a characterisation that again raises the issue of the Cold
War context in which most histories of Soviet dissent were written. This questioning
of traditional characterisations of the Khrushchev era and of dissenters’ political
attitudes are both important themes that run through this thesis.
0.2 DEFINITION OF TERMS
The next task at hand is to provide a definition of exactly what is meant by the term
‘political dissent’: what behaviours it encompasses and what it does not. In fact, one
finds the term ‘political dissent’ in a number of works, though rarely with any
explanation of precisely what it entailed. 19 Indeed, recent Russian sources on this
theme have used several terms including: inakomyslie (otherwise-thinking), kramola
(subversion or sedition), raznomyslie (different-thinking) and protivostoyanie
(confrontation). 20 It is clearly the case, therefore, that although the term ‘political
L. Eremina and E. Zhemkova eds, Korni Travy: Sbornik statei molodykh istorikov, Moskva: Zven’ya,
1996; E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, Moskva: Rossiya molodaya, 1993; B. Firsov, Raznomyslie v
SSSR 1940-1960 gody: Istoriya, teoriya i praktika, Sankt Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo
universiteta v Sankt Peterburge, 2008.
19
For example, Fursenko and Naftali refer to a ‘hardening of attitudes toward political dissent’ in
Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2006, p. 141. The same theme has also been addressed by historians of Nazi Germany such
as I. Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1983.
20
See Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, and V. Kozlov, Neizvestnyi
SSSR: protivostoyanie naroda i vlasti 1953-1985, Moskva: Olma-Press, 2006.
11
dissent’ can be broadly understood, it is worthwhile to explore its dimensions in some
depth and to define its parameters.
However, before expanding further on a definition of what is meant by ‘political
dissent’, it is worthwhile briefly to revisit and restate what we understand by the
broader notion of ‘dissent’. As Robert Cutler has already pointed out, this is a
question that has roused considerable and heated debate. 21 In the historiographical
context of the Soviet regime the term ‘dissent’ means something more than simply
‘disagreement’ or ‘dispute’ as one would find in a standard dictionary definition or
might encounter in political discourse on Western democracies.
For example,
‘dissent’ generally does not refer to any kind of intra-elite factional strife or
sanctioned and tolerated debate. Instead it denotes some degree of conflict with the
political authorities whereby citizens engaged in any of a number of actions that,
although in many instances not actually against the law, nonetheless seriously
breached the behavioural norms that the regime demanded of its citizens.
Frederick Barghoorn, one of the leading scholars on the dissident movement of the
Brezhnev period, defined dissent as ‘the persistent - and from the official point of
view - objectionable advocacy of policies differing from or contrary to those which
the dominant group in the supreme CPSU control and decision making
bodies…adopt’. 22
The only significant point on which this study diverges from
Barghoorn’s definition is by omitting the term ‘persistent’.
What this thesis
addresses, therefore, are various forms of criticism, protest and abuse aimed at the
21
R. Cutler, ‘Soviet Dissent Under Khrushchev: An Analytical Study’, Comparative Politics, Vol.13,
No.1, October 1980, pp. 15-35.
22
F. Barghoorn, ‘Soviet Political Doctrine and the Problem of Opposition’, Bucknell Review, Vol. 12,
No.2, May 1964, p. 4.
12
political authorities and the policies or activities that they undertook, whether
occurring on one occasion or many occasions.
Perhaps the most instructive way in which to elucidate dissent as a social phenomenon
is with reference to Albert O. Hirschman’s model on ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’. 23
The subject of Hirschman’s work, as it relates to this thesis, concerns the way that
citizens respond to decline in regimes, in particular ones with the potential to be
rejuvenated if sufficient effort and attention are expended on the task. 24 It would, of
course, be incorrect to staunchly assert that the Soviet regime was one in definite and
comprehensive decline by the Khrushchev period - in fact quite the opposite was true
in certain fields. What was undergoing decline, however, was the Stalinist system of
rule that had been in place for many years and, with the benefit of hindsight,
ultimately proved to be in a state of relatively limited decline. It is important to state,
however, that the aim here is not to analyse Soviet dissent in terms of Hirschman’s
model but to clarify further what is meant by ‘dissent’ as a social phenomenon.
The crux of Hirschman’s model argues that citizens of states in decline are presented
with three options: ‘exit’, ‘voice’ and ‘loyalty’.
The ‘exit’ option is simply to
abandon or attempt to abandon the system in its entirety, namely by emigration or by
some other means of detaching oneself from the regime in question. The ‘voice’
23
A. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States,
London: Harvard University Press, 1970.
24
As an economist by profession, Hirschman’s main preoccupation has been with the manner in which
consumers respond to decline in companies. Nonetheless, he asserts that the same principles apply to
the relationship between regimes and their citizens. His model has been applied to dissenting
behaviour under various regimes including Cuba, Mexico and the former GDR. See J. Colomer, ‘Exit,
Voice and Hostility in Cuba’, International Migration Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 423442; J. Langston, ‘Breaking Out Is Hard To Do: Exit, Voice and Loyalty in Mexico’s One-Party
Hegemonic Regime’, Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 44, No. 3, Autumn 2002, pp. 61-88; S.
Pfaff and H. Kim, ‘Exit-Voice Dynamics in Collective Action: An Analysis of Emigration and Protest
in the East German Revolution’, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 109, No. 2, September 2003,
pp. 401-444.
13
option is predicated on manifesting dissatisfaction by engaging in various activities
that do not adhere to established behavioural norms. The final category of ‘loyalty’ is
one where citizens’ grievances are endured without recourse to overt complaint yet
their loyalty remains conditional upon the state continuing to uphold its end of the
social contract on which its relationship with society is based.
It is, therefore, the second, ‘voice’, option with which the present study is
predominantly concerned. As Hirschman states: ‘Voice is here defined as any attempt
at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs whether
through individual or collective petition to the management directly in charge…or
through various types of actions and protests, including those that are meant to
mobilize public opinion’. 25
All of this provides a useful platform on which to base our approach to the wider
phenomenon of Soviet dissent, but it is also vital to elaborate what is meant by
‘political dissent’. Perhaps the most useful analogy to draw at this initial stage is with
the Brezhnev era dissident movement.
Scholars have long acknowledged it as
consisting of three quite distinct facets: nationalist, religious and human rights
movements. 26 Similarly, in the Khrushchev period one can quite clearly distinguish
nationalist and religious dissent but also something else that fits into neither category,
though it was not primarily concerned with defending rights either. 27
One can
broadly define political dissent as being that ‘something else’: those acts of dissent
25
Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, p. 30.
The best example of this can be seen in the title of Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s 1987 work Soviet Dissent:
Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights.
27
In fact, the Western tendency to label the Brezhnev era pravozashchitniki as human rights activists is
in itself somewhat misleading. As Robert Horvath has pointed out, they were primarily interested in
the defence of rights and the rule of law as a whole rather than just human rights. Horvath, The Legacy
of Soviet Dissent, p. 84.
26
14
that were neither religious nor nationalist in sentiment but instead were ideological in
nature. While many members of the Brezhnev era human rights movement shied
away from overtly political protest and criticism, the Khrushchev years witnessed a
considerable flourishing of exactly this kind of behaviour.
It is important to emphasise that this thesis does not seek to look at all types of nonconformity in the Khrushchev years. The key point is that these were acts of dissent
that reflected or implied political discontent. The apparent rise in hooliganism – such
as gang fights among youths or robberies and assaults – that took place during the
period is therefore not a major concern of this thesis. Similarly, what could be termed
the cultural non-conformism of stilyagi, falls beyond the remit of the present work.
Although both of the above to some extent demonstrated a rejection of the regime’s
values, they were also distinct socio-cultural phenomena in their own right.
The behaviours under discussion are ones that either reflected or implied discontent
with the contemporary Soviet political environment and did so without reference to
what Yitzhak Brudny has labelled a ‘terminal community’ – meaning an entity such
as a state or religion for whose benefit dissenting acts were undertaken. 28 In their
place one encounters a profusion of themes and aims based upon criticism or rejection
of some aspect of the existing regime such as excessive bureaucracy, foreign policy or
elite privilege. Essentially, this meant acts of dissent that can be defined as ‘protest
and criticism involving language and behaviours that either reflected or implied
discontent at the policies, representatives and goals of the contemporary Soviet
regime’. For example, this could involve citizens making public outbursts such as
28
See Y. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State 1953-1991,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
15
‘long live President Eisenhower!’ or ‘communists are worse than fascists’, writing
anonymous letters and leaflets calling for Khrushchev to be branded an ‘enemy of the
people’ or forming underground groups to struggle for workers’ interests.
One of the vital criteria of the present work is that it addresses what could be termed
‘active dissent’ rather than ‘passive dissent’. Behaviours such as simply listening to
Radio Liberty in the privacy of one’s own apartment are generally not a feature of this
thesis – unless followed by some more purposive behaviour. In this sense it is useful
to think in terms of a spectrum of dissenting behaviour rather than in simple binary
terms of ‘dissent’ or ‘not dissent’.
Listening to Western radio broadcasts and
privately criticising any given policy or individual would occupy the lower end of
such a dissenting spectrum whereas activities such as distributing anti-Soviet leaflets
and forming underground groups were clearly higher up the scale. It is the higher end
of the spectrum with which the present work is primarily concerned. Among the
fields that the present study does address are what caused passive discontent to be
translated into action and how far the criticisms made by dissenters were in some way
reflective of wider public moods.
This focus on active dissent does not imply that passive dissent was somehow
unimportant or unworthy of study.
Indeed, themes of passive dissent such as
workplace drunkenness, theft and feigned compliance are undoubtedly subjects
worthy of future research in this context. The point to be emphasised here is that this
thesis is primarily concerned with the way that citizens expressed opposition or anger
at the authorities, why they did so and what kind of response this generated. Those
acts which displayed some kind of public facet not only shed more light on the nature
16
of interaction between the regime and society but also represented a more immediate
and visceral challenge to authority that was fundamentally new for the post-Stalin era.
0.3 PARAMETERS OF THE STUDY
The acts of political dissent that are addressed in this thesis constitute only a part of
the dissenting behaviour that took place between 1956 and 1964. The Khrushchev era
was also a time of burgeoning nationalist and religious dissent. In the Baltic States,
Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia there were numerous instances of citizens undertaking
acts of protest on the basis of hurt national sentiment. 29 Similarly, large numbers of
Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostalists along with members of many other
religious faiths were involved in acts of protest at the Soviet authorities and defiance
of the stringent limits placed upon religious observance. While all three genres of
dissent – nationalist, religious and political – had a commonality of conflict with the
authorities, they also had much that separated them: in their themes, forms and aims
religious, nationalist and political dissent differed from each other notably at times. It
was actually not until well into the Brezhnev era that there was any significant degree
of interaction and co-operation between the three. 30
Although important and interesting themes of activity, this thesis does not seek to
address the issues of nationalist or religious dissent. While there are undoubtedly
some advantages to be drawn from looking at all forms of dissenting behaviour
29
These might include displaying long-suppressed national flags and emblems on windows and walls
or forming underground groups to struggle against perceived Russian domination.
30
There were exceptions to this trend, such as Petr Grigorenko’s long-standing interest in the fate of
the Crimean Tatars, but the pattern remains essentially valid. In some cases dissenting groups, most
notably the Jewish Refuseniks, deliberately avoided the themes and individuals involved in other
dissident struggles so as not to bring further persecution upon their own cause.
17
collectively there are also benefits in studying each individually, especially since this
is a field of research that is still in its infancy. Although by no means the only reason
for omitting nationalist and religious activity, there are also issues of scope to be
considered in a work of this length. One could not hope to say something meaningful
about nationalist dissent without looking at how it was manifested differently in the
three Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia for example or to discuss
religious dissent without looking at Orthodox Believers, Jews, Muslims and many
other faiths besides. Attempting to address all of these within one thesis would in fact
do a disservice to each and render nuanced discussion all but impossible.
More importantly for the present work, nationalist and religious dissent were
generally less likely to be caused by contemporary issues to the same extent as the
behaviours addressed herein. For example, the aims of nationalists in the Baltic States
or members of Baptist and Adventist religious groups were essentially little different
under Khrushchev than they had been under Stalin and would later be under
Brezhnev. Political dissent, however, was more likely to be prompted directly by the
contemporary political environment. This can be seen in events and themes such as
reactions to the Hungarian rising, attitudes to Khrushchev, support for the regime’s
opponents at any given time or responses to the raft of price increases that occurred in
the summer of 1962.
Of course, one could not say that any given act of criticism or protest was apolitical
simply because it had nationalist overtones or called for religious freedom, for
example. With the USSR being a state where so many aspects of everyday life were
heavily politicised and dictated by the communist regime one could perhaps argue
18
that almost any kind of complaint was, by definition, political dissent. This would,
however, be an excessive over-simplification.
As this thesis consistently
demonstrates, the Soviet Union was not a totalitarian society in the Khrushchev era
and one ought not to view every facet of life as being ‘political’. Politics continued to
be an unavoidable aspect of everyday life but, just as all happiness was not politicallybased, neither was all discontent.
There were naturally a few ‘grey areas’ where nationalist, religious and political
dissent overlapped to some extent, though they appear to have been surprisingly few.
In the vast majority of instances it is immediately evident from the details held in a
particular case file whether an act of protest ought to be classified as ‘political’,
‘nationalist’ or ‘religious’. With thousands of case files available, those which have
been selected and discussed in this thesis are ones in which acts have given no overt
reason to suspect any nationalist or religious sentiment.
One occasionally encounters KGB reports providing condensed summaries of
dissenting activity around the country that tell of how many anti-Soviet leaflets had
been discovered in the preceding weeks and months and how many authors of such
leaflets had been uncovered without giving any detail on their locations or
motivations. While the more detailed reports show that a significant majority of these
materials were indeed dedicated to political themes, rather than nationalist or religious
ones, this was not the case in every instance.
However, these figures are still
presented to the reader in order to help give some idea of the overall scale of
dissenting behaviour – a problem that has long dogged those who study the subject
and on which some tentative outlines can now be drawn.
19
It is also worthwhile briefly to speak about the place of ‘thaw era’ literature in this
thesis. Unlike dissent, the cultural developments of the era in question have already
been addressed in some detail elsewhere. A number of the most important literary
works of the Khrushchev years, such as Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone
(1956) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
are discussed herein yet, for the most part, the literary thaw is a peripheral issue in the
present work. How far one can consider such works to be acts of dissent is somewhat
debatable – they did offer a degree of criticism yet they were officially sanctioned and
published, and even encouraged to criticise ‘from on high’ on occasion. 31
Dina
Spechler’s use of the term ‘permitted dissent’ is perhaps the most useful way of
relating the liberal literature of the Khrushchev era to the present study. 32
Indeed, when one reads Spechler’s account of the liberal literary journal Novyi Mir
during the Khrushchev years, it soon becomes apparent that this was a field that did
not necessarily reflect public moods and contemporary issues quite as much as it
reflected ongoing power struggles within the top leadership and the cultural
establishment. As such, officially sanctioned literature is predominantly regarded as
an aspect of state policy and of the intra-regime struggle between liberals and
conservatives rather than as political dissent.
31
Perhaps the most notable example of this was a speech delivered to the XXII CPSU Congress in
1961 by Novyi Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky. He called for writers to start sending in more
challenging works for publication. This prompted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to submit a manuscript that
had remained hidden for several years and would become one of the defining points of deStalinisation,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
32
See D. Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novy Mir and the Soviet Regime, New York:
Praeger, 1982.
20
0.4 SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
Aside from the published sources that have already been discussed above, much of
this thesis is based upon unpublished primary source research. This material has been
drawn from a number of archives, mainly in Moscow but also in New York and
Budapest. This has also been supplemented by information drawn from a handful of
interviews with former dissenters and leading experts on dissent, carried out in the
UK, US and Russia. Although the process remains far from complete, the opening up
of former Soviet archives has provided new materials that have undoubtedly advanced
our understanding of dissenting behaviour and official responses. With the vast
majority of dissenting activity from the period having attracted neither international
nor domestic attention, what one finds in these files is an invaluable body of evidence
on acts and individuals that are recorded nowhere else and would otherwise have been
effectively lost to history.
The most useful of these sources were the files of the Soviet Procurator on individuals
who were sentenced for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda, held at GARF (The State
Archive of the Russian Federation) in Moscow.
These contain relevant
communications between the KGB and Procurator’s office, investigation protocols
and various other forms of evidence relating to cases in which individuals or groups
were sentenced for anti-Soviet activity. Varying in size from a handful of sheets to
several hundred pages in more complex cases, a typical file might begin with a letter
from an oblast’ Procurator’s office to the central Procuracy in Moscow announcing
that the KGB had started an investigation against an individual as a result of a
particular occurrence. From there it would outline the events and activities being
21
investigated, any significant evidence that was revealed, a court judgement
(sometimes, though not often, with a transcript of the hearing) and any subsequent
appeals or offences relating to the person who had been sentenced.
With the archives of the KGB still effectively inaccessible to researchers and access to
the Presidential Archive similarly restricted, the holdings of the state Procurator
(numbering approximately 6,000 convictions for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda
between 1956 and 1964) are a particularly valuable source. They not only provide
useful detail on specific cases but, because of the size of the sample, also give some
indication of prevailing themes in dissenting behaviour and of the authorities’ general
attitude toward dissent at any specific point in the period.
The case files that have been used in this study were selected on the basis of an
annotated catalogue of individuals who were sentenced under article 58-10 during the
post-Stalin era. 33
One of the first criteria was to present a range of cases that
accurately reflected all of the major forms of dissenting behaviour such as sending
anti-Soviet letters, forming underground groups and engaging in public outbursts
against the authorities. Once this had been achieved, the range of sources was then
widened to ensure that it represented the evolving demographic and chronological
trends that can be witnessed when one looks at the era as a whole. 34
33
See V. Kozlov et al eds, 58-10 Nadzornye proizvodstva prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi
agitatsii i propaganda: annotirovannyi katalog Mart 1953 – 1991, Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond
‘Demokratiya’, 1999. Presenting a chronological list of sentences for anti-Soviet activity, the catalogue
provides basic biographical data on the individuals who were jailed and a brief description of what they
had done. These short descriptions were then used to select the full case files that were ordered at
GARF.
34
One of the ways of drawing out these trends was by producing a chronological database of
individuals convicted under article 58-10. With this panoramic view of all political convictions it
became possible to draw out the most prevalent trends of the era.
22
A considerable volume of the materials that were gathered from the Procurator
archive have not been included in the thesis because there was simply too much
evidence to fit everything into one volume. Most of those cases which have been
included are generally ones that reflect wider trends of dissenting behaviour rather
than extreme examples. Others have been used because they present telling insights
into the activities of dissenters and the authorities. In regard to dissenters this might
mean that a given case file included copies of witness statements that had been
gathered during an investigation or details of previous and subsequent arrests.
Insights into the authorities’ activity could include case files which contained court
transcripts or details of appeals against sentences.
Also of great use for the present work were the archives of the General Department –
a body that can be regarded as the ‘engine room’ of the Central Committee because it
was to here that information flowed in from all directions and where the finer details
of policies were worked out. The majority of relevant files in this archive are made
up of one or two page communiqués from the KGB to the Central Committee in
regard to individual acts of dissent or in the form of summaries of recent dissenting
activity, over state holidays or election days, for example.
These often include
information on many acts that did not reach the Procurator, either because the culprits
could not be traced or because repression via legal channels was deemed
inappropriate. Again this gives some idea of the scale and trends of dissenting
behaviour but also gives further insight into the work of the KGB and of the extent to
which the leadership was cognisant of protest and criticism.
23
Unfortunately, the General Department files do not contain any reciprocal
correspondence from the Central Committee to the security organs. Such documents
presumably remain inaccessible in the KGB archives.
Unlike the files of the
Procurator’s office, one of the great strengths of the General Department material is
that it actually holds reproductions of at least some of the anti-Soviet documents that
are discussed (several of which are reproduced in the thesis), though the amount of
detail on individual cases is somewhat less than that in the Procurator files. 35 Perhaps
the main value of this source therefore was in giving some insight into the activity of
the KGB at this time, a subject that still remains rather difficult for the Khrushchev
period in many respects.
The records of the Department of Party Organs and of the Komsomol secretariat, held
at RGANI (The Russian State Archive of Recent History) and RGASPI (The Russian
State Archive of Social and Political History) respectively, yielded some useful
statistical information about expulsions from both the CPSU and Komsomol on the
grounds of dissenting behaviour though their scope was generally rather limited. Also
at RGANI, Fond 89 (consisting primarily of evidence used in the 1992 Trial of the
Communist Party) held a number of interesting documents relating to specific
breaches of human rights and abuses of power by the regime in the Khrushchev
period but was far too limited in content to be of much use other than in several
specific cases.
In Budapest the archives of Radio Liberty – held as part of the Open Society Archives
– were both rewarding in what they held and frustrating in what was absent. The
35
One of the main reasons why such examples are not often found in the Procurator files is that a
decision was taken in 1959 to restrict access to such ‘subversive’ documents even among members of
the legal establishment. Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola, p. 24.
24
intention had been to look at transcripts of Radio Liberty broadcasts to the USSR, yet
these were no longer held in Budapest (they are currently at the Hoover Institute in
San Francisco). Instead, the most useful source of information held there were the
files of the Radio Liberty press monitoring service that included many highly
informative cuttings and analyses drawn from the Soviet print media (both national
and local), and a few from foreign media sources, in regard to various manifestations
of discontent and the authorities’ struggle against dissent. Without looking through
countless editions of a great many newspapers it would have been impossible to gain
as good an understanding of issues relating to the Soviet media in this context were it
not for the holdings of the Open Society Archives.
It is worthwhile at this stage briefly to discuss the nature of the archival sources
employed in this work. The bulk of the archival materials cited herein have been
drawn from officially generated sources; in particular from KGB investigation
protocols or from official communications between the presiding KGB chairman and
the Central Committee. This raises two immediate questions: how reliable are the
materials contained in the files and how comprehensive are they?
It is important to highlight the fact that the majority of these documents were for
strictly internal purposes. They had no directly propagandistic feature and were not
intended to misinform or present a distorted image. On the contrary, they were
principally a bare factual record, and one that the centre wished to be accurate.
Furthermore, although the Soviet legal system remained far from perfect, it did at
least dispense with much of the falsification and abuse that had characterised it in the
25
Stalin era, arrest quotas were no longer issued for the security organs and confessions
obtained by violence ceased to be a feature of investigation proceedings.
Of course, none of this is to suggest that such documents can be used unquestioningly
but it does mean that they are much more useful for attempting to recreate a
reasonably accurate depiction of the past than corresponding documents from the
Stalin period, for example. 36 Furthermore, this is not a problem confined to officially
generated sources. Documents such as Radio Liberty analyses of Soviet activity and
some dissident memoirs also occasionally take on a highly politicised colouring that
one must be careful not to take at face value. This was, at times, a particularly
adversarial situation and, therefore, one that requires the exercise of some
considerable caution.
Although highly illuminating, the information held in the archives in regard to
dissenting behaviour is by no means comprehensive, and nor could it be.
Undoubtedly there were many acts of dissent that never even came to the attention of
the authorities and have gone entirely unrecorded. The lack of access to the archives
of the KGB and to materials held in the Presidential Archive unfortunately means that
this is a theme on which there is a considerable volume of material that will most
likely remain unavailable for some time to come, particularly in regard to official
activity in the later part of the Khrushchev era. Nonetheless, it is usually possible to
piece together information from a variety of other sources where the official files
remain closed.
36
See, for example, H. Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s, London: Yale
University Press, 2007. Kuromiya analyses numerous investigation protocols on individuals sentenced
for anti-Soviet activity in the Stalin era. He demonstrates repeated inconsistencies, evidence of forced
confessions and omissions of crucial details in case files to show how countless political convictions
during the period were based on either incredibly flimsy evidence or no evidence at all.
26
In addition to the above archival research, a number of interviews and other
correspondences were conducted as part of the research for this thesis. Although
always intended to be a supplementary source rather than a key facet of the thesis,
several of these interviews proved to be particularly illuminating and undoubtedly
added a great deal to the study. Typically of oral sources, they were most valuable in
the way that they added vital contextual details and anecdotes of the kind that are
rarely found in official documents or even memoirs.
These interviews were carried out in Russia, the US and UK, among former dissenters
who were exiled or emigrated from the USSR during the Brezhnev period. 37 Owing
to the small number of interviewees and the diversity of their individual experiences it
was decided that the most profitable approach would be to conduct ‘open’ rather than
‘structured’ interviews. In most cases this meant exploring one specific event in some
detail with the interviewee but a few ‘stock’ questions were also asked, such as ‘what
was your attitude toward Khrushchev at the time?’ or ‘what was your reaction to the
Secret Speech?’
The interviewees who were approached to take part in this study were chosen
primarily because each had been involved in one or more of the most important areas
of dissenting behaviour raised in this thesis. Andrei Grigorenko, for example, had
been a member of an underground group, Yuri Orlov had openly criticised the regime
at a Party meeting following the Secret Speech and Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin had
been instrumental in persuading dissenters to abandon clandestine acts of protest in
favour of legalist forms of struggle.
Of course, one is also constrained by the
37
See appendix for a full list of interviewees with attached short biographies. Aside from recorded and
cited interviews this thesis has also benefited from consultations and advice on the theme of dissent
with specialists such as Edward Kline and Joshua Rubinstein.
27
availability of interviewees. With the Khrushchev period more than four decades in
the past, there is by no means an unlimited supply of people with whom it is possible
to meet. Furthermore, because interview evidence was always intended to play a
supplementary role in this project it was decided that time spent in Moscow ought to
be focussed on archival research.
The majority of discussions with dissenters,
therefore, were conducted with émigrés both in the UK and US where archival
evidence was less widely available.
Practically all of those who were interviewed in the course of this research project
showed excellent recollection of the period and were both forthcoming and candid on
any subject that was raised.
In many senses former dissidents make ‘good
interviewees’: they are almost universally well educated, have no reason to fear
incriminating themselves in some way and for the most part remain both interested
and passionate about the issues on which they previously protested and campaigned.
The risk of over-dramatising or over-inflating the importance of events in question
also seems to have been minimised by virtue of their having lived in the USSR for
many years subsequently, meaning that they were to a large extent ‘insulated’ from
the impact that their activities had in the West and among the wider Soviet population.
0.5 STRUCTURE OF THESIS
The main body of thesis is divided into two chronological periods, each of which
consists of two chapters.
The first and second chapters address the subjects of
dissenting behaviour and official responses respectively in the period of 1956 to 1958.
28
The third and fourth chapters then tackle the same subjects for the later period of 1959
to 1964.
This chronological division of the Khrushchev period has been employed largely in
order to emphasise the process of evolution that took place in regard to dissent and
official responses.
Although the periodisation that has been employed does not
indicate any sudden change in the dynamics of dissent, neither has it been chosen at
random. It is notable, for example, that a 1977 internal history textbook produced by
the KGB also employed a periodisation that bisected the Khrushchev era at this same
point. 38
This division largely reflects the fact that it was official policy rather than dissent
which changed most notably at this point, yet the two were, to a large extent,
inextricably linked. The earlier period was characterised by a sense of great change
and uncertainty as the boundaries of the relationship between the regime and society
had begun to be redrawn following Stalin’s death.
The authorities were rarely
proactive in tackling their critics at this point and instead relied upon what could be
termed a ‘fire-fighting’ approach to dissent.
The later part of the era was
characterised by stability and growing cynicism as the outlines of the post-Stalin
Soviet regime became more solidly established. One can see a similar theme among
dissenters of the period; at first instances of criticism and protest tended to be highly
ephemeral and linked to very specific grievances but, by around the turn of the
38
See V. Chebrikov et al, Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti: uchebnik,
Moskva: Vysshaya krasnoznamenskaya shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri sovete
ministerov SSSR, 1977. In this case the KGB divided its own history into the following periods: 19531958 and 1959-1971. The fact that the later period extends well into the Brezhnev era can be taken as a
further reflection of the continuities between the regime’s responses to dissent under Khrushchev and
Brezhnev.
29
decade, critics increasingly became better organised and demonstrated a more
fundamental sense of disenchantment at the incumbent regime.
This division into what could be termed ‘dynamic’ and ‘stable’ periods is reflected in
the way that the four chapters have been conceptualised. The first two chapters,
which deal with the earlier years of the Khrushchev era, have been written with a
particularly strong sense of chronology in order to reflect the way that different
processes and events impacted upon each other.
Although still predominantly
chronological in nature, chapters 3 and 4 do contain a slightly more thematic aspect in
order to more fully explore the most salient issues.
30
CHAPTER 1
PROTEST AND DISSENT: 1956-1958
The first half of the Khrushchev era saw protest and criticism of the authorities on a
scale that had not been witnessed for many years, or had, perhaps, never been
witnessed since the end of the civil war, in the Soviet Union. Dissenting behaviour
was not the preserve of a small section of the Moscow intelligentsia at this time, as it
largely came to be in later years, but could be seen at practically all levels of society
and in every region of the country. This was, however, a period in which the majority
of critics were essentially loyal to the overall communist regime and to the ideology
of Marxism-Leninism.
Although often quite impassioned and strident in their
remarks, genuine desire for revolution was at a minimum among dissenters around
this time.
The Stalin era too had featured occasional outbursts of protest and criticism aimed at
the authorities, yet it seems clear that the Secret Speech marked the beginning of a
new stage in the evolution of dissenting behaviour in the Soviet Union, particularly
among the intelligentsia. Public forums such as Communist Party meetings and
debates briefly became the setting for quite sharp criticism before official responses
ensured that most dissent shifted underground, resulting in a growth of activities such
as distributing hostile leaflets and forming clandestine groups.
Importantly, this was a period in which the relationship between state and society was
going through a vital transitional stage. The rules of the new era were still being
established as people learned what had and had not changed since Stalin’s death and,
31
particularly, since the upheavals of the XX CPSU Congress. Fear of the authorities
began to decline and hopes of liberalisation were aroused by the XX Party Congress
that would ultimately be dashed. The sense of enthusiasm that the Secret Speech
temporarily engendered soon began to decline and loyal criticism increasingly turned
to disenchantment and cynicism as the end of the 1950s approached.
One can discern two broad categories of dissenting behaviour that existed during the
Khrushchev era. The first category can be classified as ‘worker dissent’: this had
practically always existed to some extent and primarily involved spontaneous and
crude forms of protest that, although often manifested in political language and
imagery, were usually rooted in material discontent. The second category, labelled
herein as ‘intelligentsia dissent’, tended to be characterised at this stage by belief in a
more liberal form of communism, and was generally manifested in planned and
considered acts of dissent that more accurately reflected some genuine degree of
dissatisfaction at the prevailing political situation. Geoffrey Hosking has written of
the period that ‘…there was no contact whatsoever between workers and intellectuals:
they lived in different intellectual and moral universes’. 39 As such, it should come as
no great surprise that these two groups had quite distinct grievances and often
undertook different forms of protest.
The labels ‘worker dissent’ and ‘intelligentsia dissent’ do not indicate that these
behaviours were necessarily exclusive to members of these two bodies; merely that
these were the most prevalent social classes involved in each form of dissent
39
G. Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 297.
32
respectively. 40
These are, nonetheless, useful categories by which to view the
phenomena of dissent, particularly in regard to demonstrating the way that it evolved
throughout the Khrushchev period and beyond.
As with the major peasant rebellions of Tsarist times, worker dissent did not
necessarily represent any kind of opposition to the political status quo or defence of
those who were downtrodden by the regime. 41 For the most part, these were not
idealistic and principled criticisms but expressions of anger at the hardships of life in
the USSR. In some ways their themes were universal, such as anger at low living
standards or resentment at the privileges enjoyed by elites, but they were also
coloured by Soviet conditions and took on a superficially politicised character.
Intelligentsia dissent, on the other hand, was more specific to the contemporary
political situation and more dynamic in nature. These were usually acts of protest and
criticism that were based upon genuine political grievances rather than material
stimuli. Less volatile than worker dissent, it was, nonetheless, more enduring and can
be seen to have played a major role in the ‘pre-history’ of the subsequent dissident
movement.
1.1 DISSENT PRIOR TO THE SECRET SPEECH
Although outside of the main chronological focus of this thesis, it is worthwhile for
purposes of context briefly to look at dissenting activity in the years prior to the Secret
Speech. Furthermore, since it is one of the main themes of the present work to
40
For purposes of clarity it is worthwhile to point out that in the present framework the term
‘intelligentsia’ also encompasses the student body while the term ‘workers’ also refers to the peasantry.
41
This is a conclusion that was also reached by Marshall Shatz in Soviet Dissent in Historical
Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
33
establish that dissent was more prevalent under Khrushchev than has been commonly
recognised thus far, it is also vital to point out that 1956 did not represent any kind of
‘year zero’ in terms of protest and criticism aimed at the Soviet regime. In fact, some
degree of dissent necessarily pervades all regimes; what marks out each case as being
different are the causes, practicalities and consequences of such protest activity.
1.1.1
THE STALIN YEARS
The Stalin years appear to be something of an unknown quantity in regard to
dissenting behaviour. The sheer volume of repression under the umbrella of ‘counterrevolutionary activity’ has, perhaps, ensured that most genuine acts of protest and
criticism have been buried under a great mass of entirely fabricated cases. This is,
however, a field of study that has been gaining some ground in recent years. 42
Sarah Davies has used NKVD reports from the late 1930s to demonstrate that
dissenting behaviour was not quite as rare as one might have supposed, even during
the regime’s most repressive years.
A diverse range of themes, such as the
subscription campaigns to provide material assistance for the Republican effort in the
Spanish Civil War, the assassination of Kirov and the 1940 Labour Decree, provoked
a flurry of critical and hostile remarks, for example. NKVD reports occasionally also
showed election ballots filled out in the name of ‘Trotsky’ or ‘the Tsar’ and
mentioned instances of swastikas daubed onto walls in paint. 43
42
Works specifically addressing this theme in the last few years include L. Viola ed., Contending With
Stalinism: Soviet Power and Resistance in the 1930s, London: Cornell University Press, 2002; J.
Rossman, Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor, London: Harvard
University Press, 2005.
43
See S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent 1934-1941,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
34
Julianne Fürst has written about the youth opposition group ‘The Communist Party of
Youth’ that existed in Voronezh in the 1940s, and Veniamin Iofe (former head of the
St Petersburg branch of Memorial) has listed numerous other groups that existed
during the period, such as ‘The Organisation of Young Revolutionaries’ in Saratov,
‘The Union of Revolutionary Struggle’ in Taishet and the ‘Union of Struggle for the
Cause of the Revolution’ in Moscow. 44 Additionally, Yuri Orlov recalled that while
waiting to be demobilised at the end of the Second World War he had been invited to
join a clandestine anti-Stalin group that existed among army officers in his regiment –
an invitation he turned down. 45 Evidently, as stifling as the Stalin years were for the
expression of discontent, there were still elements of resistance to authority.
Furthermore, looking at the spate of disorders and risings in the Gulag network of the
1950s, Kozlov has suggested that what he termed ‘the era of camp rebellions’ can
actually be traced back to the late 1940s when the camp population was increasingly
composed of hardened war veterans and genuine opponents of the Soviet regime. 46
The country that Stalin left behind at his death, therefore, was one already beset by
early signs of discontent, with social tensions beginning to rise closer to the surface. 47
According to Alex Inkeles, even before Stalin’s death society had begun to
44
See J. Fürst, ‘Prisoners of the Soviet Self? : Political Youth Opposition in Late Stalinism’, EuropeAsia Studies, Vol. 54, No.3, May 2002, pp. 353-375. Also V. Iofe, Granitsy smysla: stat’i,
vystupleniya, esse, Sankt-Peterburg: Nauchno-informatsionnyi tsentr ‘Memorial’, 2002. It is also
worthwhile to flag up for the reader the fact that Fürst’s article prompted a critical response from
Hiroaki Kuomiya: ‘‘Political Youth Opposition in Late Stalinism’: Evidence and Conjecture’’, EuropeAsia Studies, Vol. 55, No. 4, June 2003, pp. 631-638. This was in turn followed by a counter-response
from Furst and a further reply from Kuromiya. See J. Fürst, ‘Re-examining Opposition Under Stalin:
Evidence and Context: A Reply to Kuromiya’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 55, No. 5, July 2003, pp. 789803 and H. Kuromiya, ‘Re-Examining Opposition Under Stalin: Further Thoughts’, Europe-Asia
Studies, Vol. 56, No. 2, March 2004, pp. 309-314.
45
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, New York, December 2006.
46
In particular these included imprisoned nationalist guerrillas from the Ukraine and the Baltic States.
See V. Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR: Protivostoyanie naroda i vlasti 1953-1985, Moskva: Olma-Press,
2006.
47
See also E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy 1945-1964, Moskva: Izdatel’skii tsentr ‘Rossiya
molodaya’, 1993.
35
demonstrate that the deprivations of low living standards and state terror would not be
so easily accepted again. 48
1.1.2
THE COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP
Reviewing the case files of individuals convicted under article 58-10, for ‘anti-Soviet
activity and propaganda’, during the years of collective leadership, one can quickly
see that nationalist and religious activity made up the considerable bulk of convictions
at that time. The former largely represented the conclusion of repressions against
citizens of the Ukraine and the Baltic States that had been ongoing since the later
stages of the Second World War and the latter was largely a result of the brief but
widespread anti-religious campaign of 1954. 49
In regard to those acts that come under the category of political dissent during the
period of collective leadership that followed Stalin’s death, the general tone had
changed only a little since the previous era. Typical examples included I.N. Pisarev’s
December 1953 conviction after writing ‘Down with the Soviet regime! Long live
Truman!’ and drawing swastikas on a wall in Chelyabinsk oblast’. 50 Similarly, I.N.
Rodin, a war invalid, was jailed in June 1955 after cursing members of the
Communist Party leadership while on a trolleybus in Moscow. 51 What one can also
see, however, is that an increasing number of people were sentenced for ‘obscene’
(netsenzurnye) public outbursts against members of the militia and various political
48
A. Inkeles, Social Change in Soviet Russia, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 28.
Some of the best coverage of the authorities’ repression of nationalist resistance in Ukraine and the
Baltic States can be found in Yu. Aksyutin, Khrushchevskaya ‘ottepel’ i obshchestvennye nastroenniya
v SSSR v 1953 – 1964, Moskva: Rosspen, 2004. In regard to the anti-religious campaign during the
years of collective leadership, see J. Delaney-Grossman, ‘Khrushchev’s Anti-Religious Policy and the
Campaign of 1954’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, January 1973, pp. 374-386.
50
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 77681, ll. 1-3.
51
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 67444, l. 1.
49
36
figures as well as individuals being jailed after sending letters containing threats or
anti-Soviet expressions to newspapers and political figures.
Up until the Secret Speech this kind of crude and often spontaneous worker dissent
continued to predominate. Where the relevant documentation is available it seems
that those who were arrested and sentenced for such acts were most often poorly
educated males from the Slavic republics of the USSR. 52 Quite frequently they were
also either intoxicated at the time of the event or were actually serving prisoners. One
can see that criticism and frustration were increasingly beginning to appear in the
public sphere, though still in very limited numbers and often manifested in quite a
crude fashion. These behaviours did not disappear after the Secret Speech, and in fact
seem to have become more common for a time (they are addressed again later in the
present chapter), but were also supplemented with more planned and cerebral activity
that saw Soviet dissent enter a fundamentally new stage in its evolution.
With the field of study still relatively narrow, one must remain circumspect in
drawing conclusions about dissent prior to the Secret Speech. However, with the
price to be paid for disobedience and non-conformism set prohibitively high in the
Stalin years, it should perhaps come as no surprise that one generally does not
encounter the kinds of reasoned and persistent criticism that began to occur later
under Khrushchev. Instead what one does see from the above evidence is a degree of
worker protest and dissent that was predominantly spontaneous and without
consideration of the potential consequences. What this perhaps reflected was the
extent to which approximately two and a half decades of Stalinism had stifled almost
52
Procurator files on individuals sentenced for anti-Soviet activity included a survey of basic
biographical data such as age, profession, nationality and place of residence. In many case files
education levels were also included, though this was not always the case.
37
all outward signs of genuine ideological heterodoxy and ensured that the only acts of
political protest and dissent that did occur resembled a kind of primal ‘lashing out’ at
the regime.
1.2 THE XX CONGRESS AND ITS AFTERMATH
Khrushchev’s five-hour long indictment of Stalin, delivered to a closed session of the
XX CPSU Congress on the night of 24 February 1956, was one of the pivotal
moments in Soviet history.
Furthermore, it was undoubtedly one of the most
significant factors underpinning protest and criticism throughout the entire post-Stalin
era. Many dissenters of even much later periods have cited the speech as a key
turning point in their attitude toward the regime. 53
With the exception of the riots that flared in Tbilisi on 8 and 9 March 1956, however,
the exposure of Stalin’s crimes did not provoke an immediately volatile response.
What one can see on reading accounts of individuals’ immediate responses to the
Secret Speech is that the general reaction was one of shock and stunned silence rather
than anger. 54 Although it is undoubtedly true to assert that the Secret Speech often
prompted re-evaluations of the regime that remained at a very personal level, there is
also considerable evidence to suggest that, in fact, it sparked a revival of enthusiasm
for the communist project, especially among young people and members of the
intelligentsia.
53
Examples of this include Petr Grigorenko and Leonid Plyushch. See P. Grigorenko, Memoirs, New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1982, p.222 and L.Plyushch, History’s Carnival: A Dissident’s
Autobiography, London: Harvill Press, 1979, p. 12.
54
See for example L. Lur’e and I. Malyarova eds, 1956 god. Seredina veka, Sankt-Peterburg: Neva,
2007.
38
Fedor Burlatsky, for example, described a ‘rush of young blood’ into the Party around
this time and a heightened sense of idealism among young people in particular. 55
Burlatsky himself was no ‘ordinary’ chronicler of this surge of idealistic youth but, as
a high-ranking representative of what could be termed the Communist Party’s liberal
wing, he was directly involved in it. Nonetheless, other recollections from the time
support his assertion. Revolt Pimenov, for example, wrote in his memoirs that, upon
hearing of Khrushchev’s speech in March 1956, he began to consider joining the
Communist Party. 56 Raisa Orlova described the atmosphere of the post-congress
period as ‘echoing the mass-meeting type of democracy’ that had followed October
1917. 57 It is worth pointing out, however, that Orlova was not born until 1918,
suggesting that her conception of events in 1917 may have been heavily shaped by
subsequent state propaganda. Nonetheless, this does not detract from the broad theme
of Orlova’s assertion; that the Secret Speech roused great enthusiasm and, as some
commentators have argued, a sense of spiritual and moral renewal, particularly among
the intelligentsia. 58
1.2.1
DISCUSSIONS OF THE SECRET SPEECH
This atmosphere of ‘renewal’ or ‘re-awakening’ produced a burgeoning sense of
communist utopianism which raised hopes and expectations that subsequently proved
incompatible with the regime’s intentions. Often, though not always, emerging within
55
F. Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring: The Era of Khrushchev Through the Eyes of
his Adviser, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991, p. 13.
56
R. Pimenov, Vospominaniya, Moskva: Informatsionno-ekspertnaya gruppa ‘Panorama’, 1996.
Pimenov was soon to become the founder of one of the period’s most notable underground groups,
discussed later in the present chapter, and remained one of the regime’s most enduring critics for many
years. In 1990 he was elected to the Congress of Peoples’ Deputies.
57
R. Orlova, An End to Silence: Memoirs, New York: Random House, 1983, p. 112.
58
See, for example, F. Barghoorn, Détente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR, London:
Collier Macmillan, 1976, p. 11 and C. Gerstenmaier, The Voices of the Silent, New York: Hart
Publishing Company, 1972, p. 42.
39
the ranks of the Party and Komsomol, it is from this point that one can begin to
discern a quite clear strand of ‘intelligentsia dissent’ developing in addition to the
kinds of spontaneous and crude worker dissent that had existed under Stalin. What
generally began as honest and essentially loyal criticism directed at specific flaws was
consistently frustrated, suppressed and punished by the authorities, eventually leading
to far more fundamental critiques of the wider system.
Overlaying this theme of enthusiasm for the communist project was a general
atmosphere of confusion, referred to by Michael Scammell as a ‘chasm of
uncertainty’. 59 It was made clear not just by the Speech but also by articles in the
national and regional press that the official approach to Stalin had changed, yet
initially there was little indication as to exactly where the new boundaries of
acceptable and unacceptable comment and behaviour lay.60 This prompted numerous
misjudgements on the part of individuals as to what constituted permissible behaviour
in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations. Consequently, many citizens unwittingly
overstepped this boundary in the weeks and months that followed the XX Party
Congress.
One of the most useful testimonies to this atmosphere of uncertainty and loyal
questioning could be seen in a memorandum sent to the General Department of the
Central Committee from the Department of Party Organs, which provided a summary
of questions that had been submitted at the thousands of meetings held all across the
59
M. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, New York: WW Norton and Company, 1984, p. 404.
Probably the most widely circulated of these articles was ‘Why the Cult of the Individual is Alien to
the Spirit of Marxism-Leninism’, Pravda, 28 March 1956. Among other things, the article stated that
Stalin had encouraged, rather then prevented, glorification of himself and referred to ‘grave errors’ that
had resulted from his cult.
60
40
USSR to discuss the Secret Speech. 61 The three most common questions it listed
were: ‘why was Khrushchev’s report so limited in its contents?’, ‘why was there no
self-criticism or open discussion of the report?’ and ‘what guarantees are there that
there will not be another cult?’ Among other frequently asked questions were: ‘are
not other Presidium members also guilty? They must have known (what was
happening) but will not admit it’, ‘is there not a cult around Lenin too?’ and ‘how
could the newspapers lie for so long and now change so easily?’ 62 These were
exactly the kind of questions that members of the leadership had hoped would not be
raised as a result of Khrushchev’s report.
These discussions of the Secret Speech witnessed a wave of critical questioning and
comment on a scale that had not been seen for many years. In both the Party and the
Komsomol there were sharp attacks on individual leaders and on the climate of
subservience that had developed in the country. Anastas Mikoyan, for example, was
labelled a hypocrite after people compared his fawning remarks on Stalin at the XIX
CPSU Congress (1952) with his criticism of him at the XX CPSU Congress in 1956. 63
At Moscow State University (MGU), a student meeting demanded that the Komsomol
be freed from the corrupting influence of Communist Party control. 64 Nonetheless,
the legitimacy of the regime and the ideology on which it was based appears to have
remained largely unchallenged at this time and the majority of those who made
61
These meetings primarily involved CPSU and Komsomol members but some non-communists were
able to attend in many places.
62
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 139, l. 5.
63
See A. Pyzhikov, Opyt modernizatsiya Sovetskogo obshchestva v 1953-1964 godakh: obshchestvenopoliticheskii aspect, Moskva: Izdatel’skii dom Gamma, 1998, p57. Although not on the scale of
Khrushchev’s revelations in the Secret Speech, Mikoyan too had been mildly critical of Stalin during
his own speech to the congress.
64
L. Silina, Nastroeniya sovetskogo studenchestva 1945-1964, Moskva: Russkii mir, 2004, p. 108.
41
critical remarks were actually idealistic communists hoping for improvements in the
system.
Karl Aimermakher’s collected volume of official documents relating to the Secret
Speech shows that critical remarks occurred in every union republic. 65 Similarly,
Boris Firsov has stated that by 26 August – almost exactly six months after the end of
the XX CPSU Congress – the Central Committee had received over 2,000 letters
regarding the Secret Speech, over 200 of which demanded that Stalin be removed
from the mausoleum that he shared with Lenin on Red Square. 66 In this connection it
is important to point out that questioning and criticism do not appear to have spread to
Lenin in any noticeable way. In fact the recurring theme of letters demanding Stalin’s
removal from the mausoleum on Red Square was that Lenin should no longer have to
suffer the presence of Stalin. 67 As Igor Volgin recalled of the time: ‘all of my
generation of students were anti-Stalinists, but they were not anti-Soviet’. 68
It is worthwhile to pause and consider briefly the sources on which our understanding
of events at this time is based. In the period that followed the XX Party Congress the
most sizeable body of evidence on dissenting responses to the Secret Speech is to be
found in reports filed by Party and Komsomol branches. One must, therefore, be
aware that such reports may not necessarily reflect the responses of people who were
not members of those two bodies. However, there is nothing in the primary or
secondary literature on the period to suggest that there was any notable trend of
65
See K. Aimermakher, et al, eds. Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX s’ezde
KPSS: Dokumenty, Moskva: Rosspen, 2002.
66
B. Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR 1940-1960 gody: Istoriya, teoriya i praktika, Sankt Peterburg:
Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt Peterburge, 2008, p. 258.
67
Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, p. 258.
68
Interview with Igor Volgin in L. Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’: ploshchad
Mayakovskogo 1958-1965, Moskva: Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, 1997, p. 44.
42
different responses to the Secret Speech on the part of communists and noncommunists. With CPSU and Komsomol members attending official meetings held to
discuss the Speech, it was surely they that knew most about its content and were
therefore most likely to provide the first wave of responses. It is also important to
remember that Khrushchev’s ‘revelations’ about the Stalin era had focused primarily
upon the sufferings inflicted upon members of the Communist Party rather than the
country as a whole.
The sense of confusion and frustration that the Secret Speech triggered was
exacerbated by Khrushchev’s infrequent backtracking on the Stalin question. This
can be seen in a letter sent to the Central Committee Presidium by M. Petrygin of
Tuaps after Khrushchev had spoken about Stalin in glowing terms at the Chinese
embassy in January 1957. The letter began sarcastically: ‘Dear Comrades! It appears
that there are two Khrushchevs: one who defends Stalin and one who attacks him’.
Petrygin went on to ask, ‘Who can believe in a Party that so naively explains the
criminal activities of Stalin?’ He then claimed that Khrushchev’s speeches were
‘causing disorder in our minds and creating uncertainty about whether the
consequences of the cult will be overcome’. Tellingly, Petrygin ended the letter by
saying ‘sorry for being so direct but I think that this is the best way’.69 The pointed
but ultimately respectful tone of these remarks was characteristic of most criticism at
that time and, as with many other examples, it represented something akin to loyal
69
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 189, ll. 29-32. At the Chinese embassy Khrushchev had declared that being
a communist was inseparable from being a Stalinist and stated: ‘may god grant that every communist
will be able to fight for the interests of the working class as Stalin fought’. Khrushchev had also spoken
positively about Stalin at an official function to celebrate New Year’s Eve a few weeks earlier when he
had declared that he and all his colleagues were Stalinists in their uncompromising fight against the
class enemy. In regard to both of these instances see W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,
p. 301.
43
criticism that, nonetheless, went some way beyond what the authorities considered
permissible.
1.2.2
THE THERMO-TECHNICAL INSTITUTE
Probably the best example that combined these themes of uncertainty and essentially
loyal criticism can be seen in the events at the meeting held to discuss the Secret
Speech at Moscow’s Thermo-Technical Institute. 70 Upon being requested to arrange
a meeting of the Party cell for a discussion of the XX Congress’ report on Stalin, Yuri
Orlov and three colleagues (R.G. Arvalov, V.E. Nesterov and G.I. Shedrin) took it
upon themselves to give their honest and complete opinions on the matters that
Khrushchev had addressed.
In his own remarks, Orlov spoke of a prevailing sense of moral decay within the Party
and society at large. He argued that, contrary to official pronouncements, MarxismLeninism was not truly scientific and stated the need for greater democratisation in
order to protect against further abuses of power in the future. Orlov then claimed that
people at every level of society were still forced to compromise their moral
conscience and to ‘hold their fingers in the wind’ in order to judge the atmosphere and
adjust their behaviour to potentially dangerous changes in the political sphere. 71 His
three colleagues gave broadly analogous and strident opinions on Stalin and the
present state of the Soviet Union, with one member, Arvalov, even going so far as to
70
At the time this was the second most prestigious scientific institute in the USSR and the Party cell
was attached to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The only institute that could claim seniority was the
Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), headed by the pioneer of the Soviet atom
bomb, Igor Kurchatov.
71
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, December 2006.
44
insist that the working classes ought to be armed in order to protect against the
regime’s more authoritarian tendencies in the future. 72
The fact that Orlov later went on to play a major role in the establishment of the
Soviet chapter of Amnesty International in 1973 and subsequently founded the
Moscow Helsinki Watch Committee in 1976 (arguably the most important of all the
dissident organisations) makes the event significant as the point of his own break with
the regime but does not necessarily indicate that he was one of its opponents. In fact,
as he himself pointed out fifty years later: ‘it would probably look good for me now to
say that I really was an anti-communist but that is not true at all. I was still very much
a communist then’. 73 When the head of the institute, Abram Alikhanov, informed the
quartet that he had been ordered to fire them he said ‘you are either heroes or fools for
what you did’. When questioned whether heroism or foolishness had prompted their
actions, Orlov conceded candidly that both had probably played a role. 74
There were a few noteworthy consequences of the meeting at the Thermo-Technical
Institute. Firstly, a motion put forward to condemn the quartet’s remarks as having
been immature and mistaken received very little support within the Party cell. The
majority of those present chose to abstain or to reject the proposal.
Secondly,
aggrieved at the way the quartet had been treated, a number of fellow scientists from
around the USSR collaborated in donating money to support the dismissed physicists
until they were able to find work. The third notable consequence was that, after the
four were attacked in the media, their case became known nationally and inspired
considerable sympathy, in later years being cited as an inspiration by various
72
RGANI, f. 3, op. 14, d. 13, l. 78.
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, December 2006.
74
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, December 2006.
73
45
subsequent dissenters. 75 Unable to find scientific work any closer than Yerevan,
Orlov arrived in Armenia a year later to discover that many people there were
immediately well disposed toward him as a result of the media attack on the group. 76
One need only to contrast this state of affairs with stories from the Stalin era where
people did not dare to speak of long-standing friends or even family members who
had been taken away by the security organs. 77
Perhaps the most important and enduring factor that proved tangential to the events of
the XX Congress was the realisation that it had become increasingly possible to give
an honest and critical opinion about the political situation without ultimately risking
personal disaster. The Secret Speech gave final confirmation of a trend that was
already becoming evident: that the price to be paid for criticism had lowered
sufficiently that it need not be entirely prohibitive for those who might anticipate the
consequences of their behaviour. As Moshe Lewin has written: ‘When in 1956,
Nikita Khrushchev launched his sensational attack on Stalin at the Twentieth Party
Congress, Soviet society, and especially the intelligentsia, understood that the days of
Stalinist show trials and arbitrary arrests and executions had gone for good’. 78
Responses to dissent could still be harsh but not on the same scale as before.
What this meant was that protest and criticism were no longer the preserve of those
who acted impulsively or without consideration of the potential consequences.
However, in regard to Lewin’s assertion, it is worth adding the caveat that Stalinism
75
In conversation, Orlov stated that Petr Grigorenko had been one such individual. The memoirs of
Revolt Pimenov show him to have been similarly influenced by Orlov’s speech. See Pimenov,
Vospominaniya.
76
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, December 2006.
77
See, for example, A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, London: Allen Lane, 2003
and O.Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, London: Allen Lane, 2007.
78
M. Lewin, The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005, p. 156.
46
had left a deep and lasting impression on many. Young people would probably have
found it much easier to accept that show trials and arbitrary arrests had ended than
would many people old enough to have been touched by those events or even to
remember them.
This decline in fear of the authorities could also be seen in people’s attitudes toward
dissenters around this time. It has already been mentioned, for example, that Yuri
Orlov received financial assistance from fellow scientists and found that his criticism
of the regime had granted him a considerable degree of credibility in Armenia.
Similarly, recalling his father Petr’s break with the regime (of which he had
previously been a particularly committed adherent) after making a speech critical of
Khrushchev at a Moscow Party congress in 1962, Andrei Grigorenko said that ‘yes, a
few people began to avoid us after that but we also made new acquaintances because
of it. I think maybe our social circle actually grew overall’. 79 Vladimir Shlapentokh
also claimed that ‘…if publicly a majority of Soviet people continued to behave
toward heretics in almost the same way as they had under Stalin, their private
behaviour was very different. Unlike in the past, a significant number of people
defied the authorities and continued to entertain relations with people denounced as
foes of the Soviet system’. 80
This appears to have been a time when many of the regime’s critics could potentially
have been ‘brought back into the fold’ but were not. As Boris Firsov has argued: ‘it
was at this stage that the regime chose not to enter into a dialogue with its critics and
79
Interview with Andrei Grigorenko, New York, October 2006.
V. Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin
Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 123.
80
47
passed up the historical chance to stabilise the developing crisis’. 81 Instead, the
regime only compounded many critics’ frustrations over the following weeks and
months. Already both sides of the regime-dissenter confrontation that would persist
for much of the next three decades were beginning to take shape. What one can see
from this time onward are the early stages of a process whereby loyal criticism began
to shift toward cynicism and outright rejection of the regime, partly because of the
ongoing personal ‘re-evaluations’ and partly because of the way that the authorities
ostracised those who had engaged in even relatively mild criticism.
1.2.3
MARXISM-LENINISM
Not all of those who undertook dissenting activities in the wake of the Secret Speech
attempted to do so in a constructive and loyal manner, however. In Arkhangel’
oblast’, for example, Boris Generozov was arrested in April 1956 after producing six
political leaflets and reading them to fellow workers at a forestry enterprise. Included
in Generozov’s leaflets were the following statements:
The Stalinist Communist Party has nothing to do with Lenin’s Party. It is now
criminal and against the people. The Party hides Stalin’s crimes from the country
and is now run by cowards and degenerates. The Soviets and Trade Unions are
used only to terrorise the people.
Do the people need such a Party? Or a Party at all? No! It is not needed!
All of the country is striving for communism, we do not need exploiters. The Party
is not creating the conditions for this transition.
Is it possible to believe in this government? No! Never!
For three years the Party has hidden Stalin’s crimes and now exposes them only
because they are under pressure from public opinion. 82
81
82
Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, p. 263.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 83224, ll. 1-12.
48
Generozov was certainly not alone in viewing the Secret Speech as little more than
eyewash. Leningrad geo-physicist N.N. Smirnov was one of many who wrote to the
Central Committee demanding that Stalin’s crimes be examined and exposed in a
more rigorous and open fashion with punishment for those around him who were
found to be responsible. Smirnov was subsequently confined to a psychiatric hospital
as a result of his letter.
Although a far more bitter attack on the authorities than previous examples cited in
this work, it is again possible to see clearly that the ideological basis of Generozov’s
comments remained within a fundamentally Marxist-Leninist structure. Whether this
trend existed primarily because years of Stalin-imposed isolation left the Soviet
people with little capacity to envisage alternative political philosophies, as Jochen
Hellbeck has suggested, or whether genuine communist utopianism had been reignited by Khrushchev is impossible to state definitively. 83
A broad range of
contemporary and secondary sources do suggest that there was a renewed sense of
communist idealism around this time, yet it was also the case that as the isolation of
the Stalin years receded further into the past, fervent communist faith also seems to
have declined and new political belief systems accordingly arose. However, these
two arguments – that Marxist-Leninist ideology predominated because people were
genuinely enthused about communism at the time or because competing ideologies
had been so successfully wiped from the popular mindset by years of Stalinist
isolation and indoctrination – are by no means mutually exclusive and the two may
even have exacerbated one another.
83
See J. Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin, London: Harvard University
Press, 2006.
49
It seems that Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin did not fatally undermine the
regime but did impact significantly upon the relationship between state and society.
Many of those who later became critics and enemies of the Soviet regime became
alienated from it largely because the promises that the XX Party Congress seemed to
offer were not carried out. One can see this in a large numbers of speeches, leaflets
and letters that condemned the authorities for ‘betraying the spirit of the XX
Congress’. Additionally, the Secret Speech facilitated the voicing of discontent and
disagreement by demonstrating that criticism and protest no longer cost as high a
price as previously and by decisively undermining the regime’s claim to political
infallibility.
1.2.4
PRO-STALIN DISSENT
One also encounters a sharply contrasting theme of dissenting behaviour resulting
from the attack on the ‘Cult of Personality’: that of protest and criticism on the
grounds of defending Stalin. The mass disorders in Georgia on 8 and 9 March 1956
were the most famous instance of pro-Stalin dissent yet their origins remain somewhat
unclear.
Kozlov has suggested that they were essentially a Georgian nationalist
phenomenon, while Jeremy Smith has argued that they genuinely were motivated by
support for Stalin.
84
Events in Tbilisi are discussed at greater length in chapter 3,
though it is worthwhile to point out here that there appears to be no evidence that
communism as an ideology was the target of protesters’ criticism.
84
See V. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years,
London: M.E. Sharpe, 2002 and J. Smith, Beria, Stalin, Khrushchev and Georgian Nationalism: The
March 1956 Tbilisi Events in Context, Unpublished conference paper presented to September 2008
Manchester University Workshop on Networks and Hierarchies in the Soviet Provinces.
50
As the period progressed, two reasonably distinct trends of pro-Stalin dissent could be
witnessed. The first was driven by genuine support for Stalin and Stalinism while the
second was employed primarily as a means of attacking Khrushchev because Stalin
was seen as his enemy. The first trend was particularly notable after the Secret
Speech but also in the wake of the June 1957 expulsion of the ‘anti-Party group’ that
saw prominent arch-Stalinists such as Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich
removed from the leadership and disgraced. The subsequent renaming of enterprises
and towns that had been named in their honour also saw sporadic outbursts of
dissent. 85 In such instances Khrushchev was often attacked as a liar and a usurper
who was fraudulently seeking to establish his own authority at the expense of Stalin’s
reputation, and he was accused of weakening the state and causing living standards to
plummet. One example of this could be seen in the case of N.N. Sitnikov (a CPSU
member) who was jailed after sending six anonymous letters to the Central
Committee in which he branded party policy as anti-Leninist and expressed vigorous
opposition to the removal of the anti-Party group. 86
Interestingly, there were relatively few prosecutions under article 58-10 for behaviour
that could be categorised as pro-Stalin political dissent, suggesting that it was either
rare in occurrence or was less likely to draw a punitive response than were other
themes of dissenting activity. The two were not necessarily exclusive of one another
yet the likelihood seems to be that in the ranks of the security organs at least, there
may well have been a tendency toward indulging those who engaged in pro-Stalin
protest and dissent provided that matters did not get out of hand as they clearly had
85
See, for example, E. Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient
Russians, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
86
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 80699, ll. 1-4.
51
done in Georgia. Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin had, after all, brought great shame
upon the security organs too for their part in the mass repressions. 87
Evidently, the Secret Speech produced a complex web of dissenting responses; some
that were strongly pro-Stalin, but more that were strongly anti-Stalin. What unified
most of them was the absence of genuine opposition toward the communist regime as
a whole. The Secret Speech’s immediate impact was to cause widespread criticism of
the authorities yet this did not truly threaten to go beyond the regime’s control. In
many ways the Secret Speech should be viewed as the beginning of a much longer
process in terms of dissenting behaviour. It not only became clear that it was possible
to dissent and survive but also roused hopes of liberalisation that were not to be
fulfilled.
1.3 AMNESTIES AND PRISONERS
One of the major consequences of Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin was that it gave the
final impetus toward the mass release, and sometimes rehabilitation, of those who
remained confined in the Gulag. The process had already begun soon after Stalin’s
death but up to 1956 had proceeded in a stuttering and largely unenthusiastic fashion,
apparently often hindered by uncooperative camp bosses and the security organs. 88
The camp network was by no means completely disbanded in the wake of the Secret
Speech and most who had been sentenced under political articles were actually not
included in the amnesties of 1956. The sheer volume of prisoners flowing out of the
87
See J. Elkner, ‘The Changing Face of Repression Under Khrushchev’ in M. Ilic and J. Smith eds,
Soviet State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev, London, Routledge, forthcoming (2009).
88
See N. Adler, Trudnoe vozvrashchenie: sud’by sovetskikh politzeklyuchennykh v 1950-1990 gody,
Moskva: Izdatel’stvo ‘Zven’ya’, 2005.
52
Gulag and back into society nonetheless made this a highly significant step in regard
to practically all aspects of Soviet life, not least in terms of dissent.
1.3.1 RELEASED PRISONERS
The effect that these prisoner releases had upon dissenting activity was rather
complicated. As Miriam Dobson has shown, there were numerous instances in 1953
when former prisoners wrote anti-Soviet leaflets and engaged in political outbursts,
apparently with the sole intention of being sent back into the camp network as a result
of their limited prospects on the outside. 89 Much the same thing happened in the
amnesties that followed the Secret Speech, with many of those who were sentenced
under article 58-10 around this time having been apprehended as a result of making
hostile political statements at train stations or on trains shortly after being released.
Whether these people had the direct intention of being returned to camps is unclear,
though the similarities with cases presented by Dobson are striking at times.
One example of this type of behaviour can be seen in the case of the Ukrainian P.N.
Sobolev of Kirovskaya oblast’ who was sentenced in January 1957 after making what
his case file referred to only as ‘anti-Soviet remarks’ on a train to Perm after being
released from camp. 90
Similarly, in March 1957 the just-released prisoners I.A.
Bodinkov and S.A. Kuznetsov were both sentenced under article 58-10 on the same
day in different parts of the country: the former after making threats against
89
M. Dobson, ‘Show the Bandit Enemies no Mercy!: Amnesty, Criminality and Public Response in
1953’, in Jones ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization.
90
GARF, f.8131, op. 31, d. 81493, l. 1.
53
communists and approving of life in the US; the latter after engaging in what the KGB
investigation only referred to as ‘anti-Soviet hooligan behaviour’ at a train station. 91
In the light of such oblique terminology as that referred to above, it is important to
consider the nature of the KGB evidence on which a large part of this study is based.
Firstly, the timing of the above-cited cases is important, coming as they did during a
major crackdown on dissent (see chapter 2). Although disconcertingly vague, terms
such as ‘anti-Soviet hooligan behaviour’ did not necessarily imply groundless
persecution. What they usually involved were drunken outbursts and threats against
members of the regime or individual communists along with other politically
indiscreet remarks. In instances such as those above one usually finds citations from a
handful of witness testimonies in the investigation protocol and often some
acknowledgement of repentance on the part of the accused. While in themselves not
completely indefatigable evidence, these do allow us to place some confidence in the
basic facts presented by KGB investigations.
One example of a released prisoner left deeply politicised by his time in the Gulag
was the Georgian Kh.A. Asadulin, who had been sentenced for ‘betrayal of the
motherland’ in 1945 and released in February 1955. Between that time and his arrest
in 1960, Asadulin produced over 10,000 anti-Soviet leaflets that were distributed in
Baku, Tbilisi and Kirovabad. According to the KGB investigation protocol, the
leaflets in question consisted of calls for citizens to struggle against the Soviet regime,
slander of the CPSU’s domestic and foreign policy and praise for the American way
91
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 78019, ll. 1-4 and f. 8131, op. 31, d. 81617, ll. 1-7.
54
of life. Under interrogation Asadulin stated that he had decided to struggle against the
regime whilst in prison and promptly did so upon his release. 92
However, cases of persistent dissent among former prisoners appear to have been
relatively few. It is, for example, a theme of Nanci Adler’s work on returning
prisoners that amnesty and rehabilitation effectively bought a prisoner’s silence in
most cases. 93 It is hard to say for certain whether similar acts of defiance actually
took place among released prisoners on any kind of scale in the Stalin years or not,
though one assumes that such behaviours would have been less common. Typically
of worker dissent, what one finds is that although often quite extreme in tone, these
outbursts were almost entirely ephemeral, with the individuals in question generally
not undertaking these kinds of behaviours again. 94
1.3.2 THE INFLUENCE OF RETURNEES
Arguably more enduring than the behaviour of released prisoners themselves was the
impact that their suffering had upon the next generation. Like many others, Mikhail
Aksenov (a Brezhnev era dissident) recalled that it was the influence of Gulag
returnees that destroyed the last of his faith in the regime and eventually turned him
into a dissident. 95 Vladimir Bukovsky too spoke at length about the influence that
meeting released prisoners and hearing their stories had had upon his own attitude
92
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 320, ll. 60-61.
See N. Adler, Life in the ‘Big Zone’: The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of Stalinist Repression,
Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, January 1999, p. 15.
94
We know this because procurator files on individuals not only contain one investigation but also
include details of any other arrests and sentences against the same individual. While in theory this may
only prove that they were not actually arrested for the same offence again it is also important to
consider that with one political sentence already recorded, it is unlikely that such individuals would be
treated with any leniency were the same matter to arise a second time.
95
Interview with Aksenov in I. Kirk, Profiles in Russian Resistance, New York: Quadrangle, 1975, p.
209.
93
55
toward the regime. 96 This is not a theme that was often manifested in concrete
dissenting activity, however, suggesting that it was a contributory factor toward
developing a critical or oppositional mentality rather than a direct catalyst for action.
Philip Boobbyer’s assertion that ‘existential questions often preceded political
opposition in the evolution of dissident thought’ surely has some resonance in this
respect. 97 Clearly, there were also a great many people who encountered released
prisoners without going on to engage in dissenting behaviour, suggesting that for the
‘average’ Soviet citizen (if such a thing can be said to have existed) this was not a
subject that would turn them into active dissenters on its own.
This touches upon a rather fundamental question as to why some people engaged in
dissenting behaviour and others remained passive in their disenchantment. There is
probably some validity in pointing to personality characteristics as a factor that made
certain individuals more inclined to rebel against authority yet this may not give the
whole picture.
For example, in regard to later years when riots and large
demonstrations flared, one must surely also look to studies in social psychology on
the way that people behave in large crowds. Similarly, with many people being jailed
in the late 1950s on the basis of statements made whilst intoxicated, it is quite clear
that there were important variables that should also be taken into account when one
considers why people engaged in dissenting behaviour. It should be emphasised,
however, that ‘mob behaviour’ and alcohol-related dissent are more closely linked to
protest among workers than members of the intelligentsia, among whom it does seem
that individual values and personality characteristics were the major driving forces
behind acts of criticism and protest.
96
97
Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Cambridge, March 2007.
P. Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 59.
56
It is also instructive to elucidate briefly some reasons why those with grievances
against the authorities refrained from engaging in acts of protest and criticism.
Vladimir Bukovsky cited a list of reasons that he heard from people for their
continued passivity. These included the need to look after the interests of one’s own
family, belief that protest only played into the hands of hardliners within the regime,
belief that protest could achieve nothing other than to incite trouble and that the only
way to achieve change was from within the system, which firstly involved displaying
outward loyalty. 98 Although all of these arguments probably had some degree of
validity, it seems eminently sensible to suggest that the main cause for inactivity was
simply fear, or what the dissident thinker Valentin Turchin labelled ‘the inertia of
fear’. 99 It is one of the central themes of this thesis that fear of the authorities
declined markedly during the Khrushchev years but this in no way suggests that it
disappeared entirely. On the contrary, fear seems to have remained a significant
impulse in Soviet society throughout the Khrushchev era and beyond. Only a few
years after the abuses of the Stalin years, this was entirely understandable. The
difference was that people now had a better chance of calculating the consequences of
their actions.
It has been suggested by some commentators that because many dissidents were close
relatives of victims of the Stalin era, this must have been the key stimulus for their
criticism of the authorities: an eminently logical conclusion.100 The most commonly
cited examples of this trend are the dissidents Roy and Zhores Medvedev, whose
98
V. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, pp. 62-4.
See V. Turchin, The Inertia of Fear, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
100
See, for example, Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective and A. Rothberg, The Heirs of
Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime 1953-1970, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
99
57
father was repressed as an enemy of the people during the Great Terror. 101 However,
Zhores Medvedev himself stated this was not the reason he found himself becoming a
critic of the regime. 102 Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin lost a brother in the repressions of
the late 1930s but did not see it as the cause of his own non-conformism, Boris Vail’
did not meet his father until he was already a teenager because he was jailed before
Vail’ was even born, yet he too did not suggest this to have been a conscious
motivation for his own political activity. 103
While there may well have been a link between Stalin era repression and dissenting
behaviour in a number of cases, it would appear that the grounds for such a causal
relationship have been overstated. In fact, it does not seem improbable to suggest that
the proportion of victims’ relatives among dissident circles may not have been
significantly different to the overall proportion of victims’ relatives within society as a
whole. While some dissenters were related to those who were persecuted in the Stalin
era, there were also a considerable number of others, such as Andrei Sakharov,
Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Orlov and Petr Grigorenko, who had little or no familial
link to the mass repressions of the Stalin era.
101
See, for example, Barghoorn, Détente and the Democratic Movement; Z. Katz, Soviet Dissenters
and Social Structures in the USSR, Massachusetts: Centre for International Studies, 1971.
102
Interview with Zhores Medvedev, London, March 2007. Medvedev stated that, like a number of
scientists, his own growing disenchantment with the regime was prompted by the continuing influence
of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko. This is a theme that is raised in more detail in chapter 3.
103
Interview with Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, Revere, Massachusetts, November 2006. It seems fair to
suggest that Volpin’s own rejection of political conformity was rooted not in any specific event but at
least partly in the contrarian nature of his personality. See, for example, B. Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship
of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights Under “Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review,
Vol. 66, No. 4, Winter 2007, pp. 630-663.
58
1.3.3 SERVING PRISONERS
It is also instructive to look at the kinds of dissenting behaviour that were taking place
in the surviving camps and prisons around this time, not least because approximately
ten per cent of those who were sentenced for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda
during the early Khrushchev years were already serving prisoners. For the most part
those serving prisoners who were sentenced under 58-10 were not originally
‘politicals’ but had been initially convicted, and in some cases repeatedly convicted,
for ‘criminal’ acts such as theft, assault or worse. 104 The kinds of dissenting acts that
these people generally engaged in were particularly unsophisticated and frequently
represented little more than hooliganism or anti-state protest under a political façade:
the most base form of worker dissent.
One example of this crude form of protest could be seen in the case of the Chuvash
I.E. Kryshkin. Already serving a criminal sentence in Chelyabinsk oblast’, he was
convicted in May 1957 under article 58-10 after being caught drawing swastikas on a
wall in the camp compound. 105 Later that same month the Russian N.A. Saparov was
re-sentenced in Kemerova oblast’ as a result of writing anti-Soviet slogans on walls
and on his own clothes which called for struggle against the regime. 106 Another case,
from 1964, involving the prisoner V.A. Vasil’ev in the Mordova camp network, stated
only that he had been sentenced for anti-Soviet activity after etching a ‘politically
104
There were exceptions to this rule. One was Boris Vail’, discussed later in the present chapter, who
was re-sentenced after forming an underground group while serving a camp term for underground
activity on the outside. See GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 73957, l. 37 and B. Vail’, Osobo opasnyi,
London: Overseas Publications Interchange, 1980.
105
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 80497, ll.1-2. In fact, swastikas were the most common item of camp
graffiti according to Vladimir Kozlov. See Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR, p. 119.
106
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 83874, ll. 1-2.
59
offensive’ tattoo across his own face. 107 The investigation protocol did not state
exactly what Vasil’ev had inscribed on his face but Anatoly Marchenko’s eyewitness
account of the Khrushchev era camps cited some of the most common slogans of selfmade tattoos as ‘Khrushchev’s whore’ and ‘Slave of the CPSU’. 108
One of the most common themes of dissent among prisoners has been referred to as
‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. 109 What this meant in this context was that
anyone deemed to be an enemy of Khrushchev was liable to be championed by camp
and prison inmates.
One, therefore, encounters examples of figures such as
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Hitler and Stalin all being hailed as hero figures among the
camp population on the basis that they were seen as enemies of Khrushchev.
Furthermore, one can also see that the corpus of those deemed to be enemies of
Khrushchev kept pace with political developments. Members of the anti-Party group
and later Mao Tse-tung came to feature prominently in such statements and graffiti for
a time around their respective clashes with the ruling clique. 110
At first glance the aim of these behaviours would appear to have been nothing more
than to offend the political sensibilities of the Soviet authorities. Undoubtedly for
some prisoners this was the primary reason for undertaking such forms of behaviour.
In many cases these were people who essentially had nothing more to lose and
nothing to gain from submission to the authorities. However, for others there was a
more rational reason for these acts of self-mutilation and crude abuse of authority.
107
GARF, f. 8131, op. 36, d. 1015, ll. 1-3. This case file reveals that Vasil’ev was sentenced again for
the same offence in 1966.
108
A. Marchenko, My Testimony, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969, p. 97.
109
See Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR, p. 119.
110
See Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR, p. 121.
60
Incorrectly believing rumours that political prisoners were held in better conditions
and subject to lower work norms, many ‘criminals’ attempted to have themselves
reclassified as ‘politicals’ by making anti-Soviet statements and drawing political
slogans around the camp complex. 111 A 1958 Supreme Court resolution warned
procurators that this was going on and that such individuals should no longer be
classified as ‘anti-Soviet’. 112 From that point onwards the frequency with which one
encounters serving prisoners among those convicted under article 58-10 drops
markedly. This would suggest that in this case what we are observing is the masking
or non-recording of this kind of dissent rather than genuinely low levels of political
criticism among serving prisoners.
What one can see, therefore, is that people who were either released from the Gulag
or who were serving terms in camps and prisons tended to engage in acts of protest
that did not entail any prolonged or considered political criticism. They may well
have considered themselves genuine opponents of the Soviet regime but it seems that
in many cases their resistance to authority was not ideologically based but crude
resentment of authority.
Instances of protest and criticism among serving and
released prisoners can mostly be considered in the same light as the kind of worker
dissent that had existed for years and could be seen in various countries and contexts
around the globe. 113
It seems that the impact that released prisoners had upon young people and members
of the intelligentsia was particularly important. Roy and Zhores Medvedev have
111
Marchenko, My Testimony, and GARF, f. 8131, op. 30, d. 5080, l. 8.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 33.
113
See, for example, K. McDermott and M. Stibbe eds, M. Revolution and Resistance in Eastern
Europe: Challenges to Communist Rule, Oxford: Berg, 2006.
112
61
argued that: ‘the mass rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims had an inestimable impact
upon the psychological outlook of every thinking person in the Soviet Union’. 114 The
Medvedev brothers most likely exaggerated in suggesting that ‘every’ thinking Soviet
citizen was affected – one ought not to forget that the pair were outspoken critics of
the regime – though it is quite clear that this was true of many people. Nonetheless, it
was still a relatively small proportion of those ‘thinking people’ who went on to
engage in overt acts of criticism and protest.
1.4 THE HUNGARIAN RISING
As we have already seen, the Secret Speech gave rise to countless outbursts of
criticism and pointed questions, particularly within the Party and Komsomol, but for
the most part did not generate widespread and truly embittered dissenting behaviour.
Within a few months, however, the ‘chasm of uncertainty’ that was opened up by the
Speech had been closed and liberalisation stalled in the face of conservative
resistance. As 1956 progressed, events in Hungary and to a lesser extent in Poland
too, began to have a major impact upon dissent, particularly among those young
people and members of the intelligentsia who had been enthused by the Secret
Speech.
The feeling of hope and enthusiasm that had followed the Secret Speech contrasted
sharply with the immediate and visceral anger with which many people reacted to the
Soviet invasion of Hungary. 115 Even several decades later, in response to the question
114
R. Medvedev and Zh. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1976, p. 20.
115
See Lur’e and Malyarova eds, 1956 god.
62
of whether they remembered the Hungarian rising, almost all of the attendees at the
Mayakovsky Square poetry readings (see chapter 3) gave an emphatic ‘very clearly!’
and described the general sense of resentment that it had provoked in them. 116 As
Vladimir Bukovsky recalled: ‘after all the exposures, denunciations and posthumous
rehabilitations, after all the reassurances about the impossibility of repeating the past,
we were now presented with corpses, tanks, brute force and lies all over again. Just
one more convincing proof that nothing had changed at all’. 117 It is important to note
that Bukovsky was one of the Soviet regime’s most strident critics, and, moreover,
wrote his memoirs shortly after being sent directly from prison into exile, yet in this
case his sentiments seem to have been widely shared among other dissenters in
particular.
As with the events of the 1968 Prague Spring, many of those who fervently hoped for
genuine liberalisation inside the USSR had viewed the developing reforms in Hungary
with hope for the Soviet system. They believed that if some degree of flexibility and
plurality had been proven successful elsewhere then the Soviet regime may eventually
accept a similar scenario. With the Secret Speech only recently engendering a sense
of optimism and ‘rebirth’, the brief process of liberalisation in Hungary during the
summer and early autumn of 1956 can only have heightened this sense of optimism.
116
See Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’, p. 214. Discussed at more length in chapter 3,
these were a series of unsanctioned poetry readings held in the centre of Moscow during the late 1950s
and early 1960s.
117
Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, p. 89.
63
1.4.1 STUDENT PROTEST
Cornelia Gerstenmaier has given some insight into the volume of critical remarks
among young people on this theme by stating that in Leningrad alone the Komsomol
recommended that over 4,000 students be expelled from high school on the basis of
comments made in relation to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. 118 Among those who
found themselves reprimanded at school – in Moscow rather than Leningrad – after
talking about events in Hungary were Eduard Kuznetsov and Viktor Khaustov, both
of whom were later involved in the dissident movement for many years. 119 However,
among high school students it seems that one could expect to find that, in fact, many
did not possess strong opinions on the invasion of Hungary and had unknowingly
transgressed the borders of acceptable behaviour in a relatively innocent fashion.
A Daily Mail report from 5 December 1956 gave further details, claiming that over
1,000 students had been expelled from Moscow State University alone on the basis of
criticism and demonstrations against the regime, most of them in the earliest days of
the Hungarian rising. 120 Unfortunately neither Gerstenmaier nor the Daily Mail report
have provided any kind of verifiable evidence in regard to their respective figures,
meaning that they ought to be regarded with a considerable degree of caution.
Nonetheless, these numbers do not seem at all implausible.
118
Gerstenmaier, The Voices of the Silent, p. 92.
Interview with Eduard Kuznetsov in Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’, p. 214.
120
Daily Mail, 5 December 1956. Although the Daily Mail report failed to provide any kind of
verifiable source for this figure, there undoubtedly was a purge of ‘unreliable elements’ taking place
across the Soviet higher education system (both staff and students) at this time. See G. Kuzovkin,
‘Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniya po politicheskim motivam v period rannei ‘ottepel’’, in L.
Eremina and E. Zhemkova eds, Korni Travy: Sbornik statei molodykh istorikov, Moskva: Zven’ya,
1996.
119
64
Collective student and youth protests sporadically flared for a time in late 1956 at a
number of universities including Moscow State University, Leningrad State
University, Gorky University, Sverdlovsk University, Kuibyshev University and
elsewhere. 121 In Yaroslavl riot police had to be drafted in to disperse protesters
before order was fully restored and there were also cases of Polish and Hungarian
students in Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad banding together and forming groups to
agitate amongst Russian students in an attempt to stir up further protests. 122 With
newspapers from People’s Democracies including Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and
Poland having recently gone on sale in a number of major Soviet cities, it became
possible to find less heavily censored information on events in Hungary. The Soviet
authorities were therefore faced with one of the first major breaches in their monopoly
of information on the outside world – a key factor in the evolution of dissent
throughout the entire post-Stalin period.
A meeting at the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs club that subsequently aroused the
interest of the KGB had seen students of the Moscow State Historical Archive
Institute raise toasts to the Polish and Hungarian revolutions and to the ‘impending
fourth Russian revolution’. 123 According to Erik Kulavig, KGB monitoring of the
Nobel Prize winning physicist Lev Landau – who had even been willing to incur the
wrath of Stalin by refusing to work on military projects – showed that he had openly
supported the Hungarian rising and branded the CPSU ‘fascists’ on the basis of Soviet
121
M. Kramer, ‘The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary ad Poland: Reassessments and New
Findings’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33, No. 2, April 1998, p. 196. In addition to the
institutes listed above, Kramer also cited protests at the Ural Pedagogical Institute, Moscow AviationTechnical Institute, Potemkin State Pedagogical Institute, Herzen Pedagogical Institute, the Bashkirian
Pedagogical Institute and Smolensk Pedagogical Institute. It is entirely unclear why so many of the
universities that witnessed disturbances were pedagogical institutes.
122
See Kramer, ‘The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland’, p. 196.
123
Iu. Aksiutin, ‘Popular Responses to Khrushchev’, in W. Taubman, S. Khrushchev, A. Gleason eds.,
Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 193.
65
intervention there.
In private conversations recorded by the KGB Landau was
reported to have said that ‘our people are literally waist-deep in blood. What the
Hungarians have done is a magnificent achievement. They are the first to have dealt a
blow to the Jesuitical ideas of our time. And what a blow.’ 124
There were also numerous protest activities around the 7 November 1956 Revolution
Day holiday. One example included several Leningrad University students joining the
main rally in the city and shouting anti-Khrushchev slogans and declaring their
opposition to the Soviet action in Budapest. 125
In Yaroslavl the student Vitaly
Lazaryants and two friends interrupted the parade there by marching toward the
tribune with a banner demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. 126
On 4 November two sculptures of Stalin were vandalised at a park in Kherson and in
Sebastopol 14 posters of Party and government leaders were vandalized. In addition, a
total of over 1,000 anti-Soviet leaflets were distributed in the street or dropped from
hot air balloons in regions including Leningrad, Transcarpathian oblast’, Barnaul and
Riga. 127 The focus of protest and criticism continued to be restricted to specific
events, individuals and policies rather than the regime as a whole.
It seems extremely doubtful that Lazaryants or the Leningrad students would have
behaved the way they did on Revolution Day if the same situation had presented itself
five years earlier, while Stalin was alive. Similarly, a dozen years later the Soviet-led
invasion of Czechoslovakia also provoked consternation in parts of society but led to
only one especially notable instance of public protest that has come to light – the
124
Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev, p. 103. Lev Landau was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Physics in 1962.
125
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 89522, ll. 1-4.
126
GARF, f. A-461, op. 2, d. 10996, l. 17.
127
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, ll. 54-56.
66
famous ‘demonstration on Red Square’. 128 One can point to a whole range of reasons
why things were different in late 1956 but two factors stand out most of all. Firstly,
the reaction to events in Hungary was all the more impassioned because it dashed
hopes that had recently been raised by the Secret Speech.
Secondly, the new
relationship between the state and society was not yet fully settled by 1956. Fear, and
perhaps also respect, had diminished but this had not yet been compensated by the
relative material prosperity and deeply embedded social control mechanisms that
existed in the Brezhnev years.
1.4.2 OPEN CRITICISM WITHIN THE CPSU
It was also around this time that the Communist Party witnessed some of the last
notable stirrings of open dissent within its ranks before iron discipline and conformity
were restored among Party members for most of the next three decades. The specific
catalyst for this spate of strident criticism within the Party was, ironically, a letter sent
out to Party organisations that signalled the beginning of a crackdown on dissenters
that had been prompted by events in Hungary.
At a Party meeting in Cherkasskaya oblast’ for example, candidate CPSU member
A.I. Zem’sha declared that the CPSU was ‘no longer a party of communists but one of
fascists’ – for which he was subsequently jailed. 129 A report filed by the head of the
RSFSR Department of Party Organs, V. M. Churaev, on 21 February 1957 outlined a
128
On 25 August 1968 a group of eight dissenters (Larisa Bogoraz, Konstantin Babitskii, Tat’yana
Baeva,Vadim Delaunay, Vladimir Dremlyuga, Viktor Fainberg, Natal’ya Gorbanevskaya and Pavel
Litvinov) gathered at the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate and unfurled banners protesting the invasion
including ‘For your Freedom and Ours’ and ‘Hands off Czechoslovakia’. See N. Gorbanevskaya,
Polden’: delo o demonstratsii na Krasnoi Ploshchadi 25 avgusta 1968 goda, Moskva: Novoe
izdatel’stvo, 2007.
129
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 80330, ll. 1-4.
67
series of ‘anti-Party speeches’ around the country. In Yaroslavl the builder Kiselev
attacked the media coverage of events in Hungary and other People’s Democracies
and students at a forestry institute in Bryansk stated that the Soviet regime had not
improved the life of the ordinary Russians and made unfavourable comparisons with
the standard of living in the US. 130
Material shortages were at the root of many outbursts around this time. At a meeting
of the Levoberezhnyi raion Party organization of Kuibyshev a report from the
Department of Party Organs stated that CPSU candidate member Dubrovin had
declared that the Party leadership was holding back poorer kolkhozes and only helped
those which were more successful. Dubrovin was followed by Zelenov who attacked
the Party leadership for eulogising Stalin for so many years and then by Politov who
stated that the only people who lived well in the USSR were those who did no real
work, namely bureaucrats and officials. An electrician named Denyakin then posed
the ‘provocative’ question as to what was considered the minimum subsistence wage
for Soviet citizens. 131 As with the earlier meeting at the Thermo-Technical Institute,
there was loud support for people who criticised the official Party line and heckling
aimed at those who attempted to cut short the dissenters. Evidently, there was some
considerable sympathy within the Party for even quite pointed criticism of the
authorities, arguably implying, therefore, that there may have been some considerable
resentment too.
As will be shown in the following chapter, the authorities’ attempts to restore
discipline within the ranks of the Party were bearing fruit by the end of 1956. Critics
130
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 6, ll. 1-5.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 5, l. 1. The term ‘provocative’ is taken from the official report on the
meeting.
131
68
were either ‘weeded out’ or intimidated into silence and discipline was thoroughly
restored. What this meant, however, was that the most discontented elements within
the Party tended to engage in underground dissenting behaviour instead. Among
young people this could mean forming groups and distributing leaflets, while older
dissenters were more liable to send hostile letters. Presumably this distinction had its
roots in the older generation’s experiences during the Stalin years. Around this time
the Komsomol also became the object of a major drive to re-establish conformity and
obedience in its ranks but continued to be the setting for open criticism of the
authorities beyond the end of 1956.
1.4.3 DISSENT IN THE KOMSOMOL
The records of the Department of Komsomol Organs and the Komsomol Department
of Agitation and Propaganda from around this time show that open criticism was still
occurring among members of the Communist Party’s youth wing. A report sent to
Vladimir Semichastnyi (at the time, a member of the Komsomol Central Committee
but later to become KGB chairman) on 10 December 1956 stated that ‘Komsomol
organisations have not drawn the correct conclusions from the XX Party Congress and
need to strengthen their work amongst young people. As a result, in some Komsomol
branches an unhealthy atmosphere has appeared with mistaken views on life, speeches
alien to Marxist-Leninist views and a tendency to think in bourgeois terms’. 132
The same report also stated that there had been numerous calls to limit CPSU control
over the Komsomol, that students had criticised the lack of freedom in the country,
132
RGASPI, f. 1, op. 6, d. 925, l. 17.
69
attacked the privileges of the political elite and regularly listened to the BBC. Among
the concluding remarks of the report it was stated that ‘…as a rule such demagogic
speeches receive the necessary rebuff, but some Komsomoltsy do support them…’ 133
Knowing the ‘sugar coating’ that was generally employed in official reports on such
matters, one could perhaps surmise that it was not necessarily a small proportion of
Komsomol members that supported these ‘demagogic speeches’. 134
Perhaps even more so than the Communist Party, the Komsomol echoed with criticism
of the authorities. Again though, this dissatisfaction was not always ideologically
based. As the Kursk student I. Rykov stated at a meeting in 1956 ‘the Komsomol is
boring and if I had the option to join it now, I would refuse. All it expects from us is
work and study instead of happiness’. 135 Radio Liberty analyses of the Soviet press
suggested that Rykov was voicing a widely held view and that an increasing number
of Komsomol members were voicing disenchantment at the organisation by writing to
newspapers and making strongly critical speeches, attempting to evade their duties as
members and more generally feeling resentful toward the Communist Party. 136
This resentment by Komsomol members toward the Communist Party was indicative
of a generational divide that had begun to emerge since the XX Congress: a kind of
133
RGASPI, f. 1, op. 6, d. 925, l. 9.
For example, almost every report on dissenting speeches that were made at Party meetings or in
student debates began by saying something like ‘resheniya XX s’ezda KPSS vstrecheny sovetskim
narodom edinodushnym odobreniem (the decisions of the XX CPSU Congress have met with the
unanimous approval of the Soviet people), before going on to concede that ‘vmeste s tem, TsK KPSS
otmechaet chto imeyutsya otdel’nye sluchai vystuplenii antipartiinnykh elementov’ (nonetheless, the
Central Committee has noted that individual anti-Party elements made speeches), before sometimes
going on to list several pages of quite sharp criticism levelled at the authorities. According to Sarah
Davies this same basic formula was also used by the Stalin-era NKVD. See Davies, Popular Opinion
in Stalin’s Russia.
135
A. Pyzhikov, Opyt modernizatsii sovetskogo obshchestva v 1953-1964 godakh: obshchestvennopoliticheskii aspect, Moskva: Izdatel’skii dom ‘Gamma’, 1998, p. 68.
136
Radio Liberty Analysis of Current Developments in the Soviet Press. HU OSA 300-80-1, Box 394.
134
70
‘fathers and sons’ debate for Soviet times. 137
Idealistic young people were
increasingly scornful of the generation before them that had either participated in the
abuses of the Stalin years or had remained silent in order to protect themselves.
Valery Ronkin, a dedicated and active Komsomol member at the time, recalled that he
was bitterly disappointed at his own father’s refusal to speak out in the Stalin years
and told him so. 138 The fact that speaking out would have led to almost certain
annihilation suggests that there was some considerable romanticism, rather than sound
reasoning, informing this particular debate.
This divide was in itself reflective of the wider situation: Ronkin was able to criticise
and reject Stalin and the generation that had lived under him but continued to be a
dedicated believer in communism himself.
That Ronkin subsequently became
involved in underground struggle against the authorities (he was a member of the socalled Kolokol group in the mid 1960s – see chapter 4) is indicative of the trend
whereby many political dissenters tended to begin as close adherents of the regime
and its ideology before becoming increasingly alienated from it. 139
The eighteen months that followed the Hungarian rising witnessed a notable highwater mark in convictions for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda. KGB reports to
the Central Committee and case files from the Procurator’s office indicate a
137
The original ‘fathers and sons’ debate had taken place in Russia around the middle of the 19th
Century when a young generation of political radicals began to disavow the liberal romanticism of the
previous generation. The name comes from Ivan Turgenev’s literary depiction of the subject in
Fathers and Sons (1862). On this theme see M. Fainsod, ‘Soviet Youth and the Problem of
Generations’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 108, No. 5, October 1964, pp.
429-436. However, Fainsod rightly pointed out that one must remain cautious in making statements
about a group so large and varied as a whole generation.
138
V. Ronkin, Na smenu dekabryam prikhodit yanvari…, Moskva: Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, 2003, p.
25.
139
To cite only a handful of well-known dissidents who had previously been dedicated and idealistic
communists; this was the case with Petr Grigorenko, Leonid Plyushch, Yuri Orlov and Zhores
Medvedev.
71
substantial growth in what the authorities referred to as ‘anti-Soviet phenomena’, such
as people sending anonymous and threatening letters to Party officials, publicly
declaring hatred for specific members of the leadership and forming underground
groups. As it became increasingly clear just how limited the scope for loyal criticism
continued to be, the dynamics of dissent altered somewhat.
Considered political criticism came to be less frequently voiced in public, and instead
began to move underground.
Worker dissent, on the other had, seems to have
increased in the public sphere around this time, with hundreds of citizens being
arrested after spontaneous declarations of hatred for communists or threats of violence
against members of the leadership. This most likely reflected the extent to which fear
of the authorities had declined in recent times, though one should also be aware of the
possibility that such behaviour may actually have been happening for some time but
had previously been met with a less formal response.
Although the volume of dissent around the country appears to have increased
markedly – largely because of the combined impacts of the Secret Speech and
Hungarian rising – one still encounters very few genuine opponents of the regime or
of communism. This reflected the fact that most dissenters seem to have believed that
the system should be fixed rather than destroyed.
Nonetheless, after a several-month long tour of the USSR in 1957, Zinaida
Schakovsky wrote of an ‘all-pervading atmosphere of discontent’ and an ‘immense
discontent which is rumbling through the Soviet Union today’. 140 As a White Émigré
140
Z. Schakovsky, The Privilege Was Mine, London: Jonathon Cape, 1959, pp. 30, 47.
72
princess whose family was ruined by the October Revolution, one should not be
surprised to see that Schakovsky gave such a withering assessment of the communist
regime’s fortunes, but even far less politically motivated accounts by well-informed
visitors to the USSR at that time suggest that Schakovsky’s remarks were not at all
unrealistic. After a lengthy visit to the USSR around the same time, Maurice Hindus
argued that the Soviet people were entirely loyal to the regime and to communism but
did concede that the young generation in particular was brimming over with questions
and frustrations. 141
1.4.4 FORMS OF DISSENTING ACTIVITY
Owing to the fact that the Soviet authorities were paying close attention to the
problem of dissent throughout 1957 and 1958, this is a period on which a considerable
volume of official documentation exists on the matter. A 1958 Procurator review of
sentences for anti-Soviet activity gives some useful statistical data on the prevailing
forms of dissent around this time. From the 2,498 sentences for counter-revolutionary
activity in 1957 (of which 1,964 were for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda) the
following statistics were presented: 91.3% of those sentenced had acted alone, 6.1%
in groups of 2-3 people and a further 2.6% in groups of 3 or more people. Isolated
acts constituted 62.6% of all sentences while repeated acts made up 37.4%. 142
141
M. Hindus, House Without a Roof: Russia After Forty Three Years of Revolution, London: Victor
Gollancz, 1962, p. 58.
142
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 17. The important point to note at this stage is that ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ (article 58 of the RSFSR criminal code) did not just include ‘anti-Soviet activity
and propaganda’ (article 58, subsection 10 or 58-10) but also included other articles that dealt with
crimes such as terrorism too. Nonetheless, well over three quarters of conviction for counterrevolutionary crimes were for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda.
73
The predominant trend at this stage was, therefore, for lone individuals to engage in
single instances of dissenting behaviour. It is worth remembering, however, that these
people may have undertaken more acts of dissent that the KGB remained unaware of.
The review also discerned four forms of dissenting activity: oral expressions of a
counter-revolutionary nature (57.3% of sentences), anonymous anti-Soviet letters,
diaries and songs (22%), anti-Soviet leaflets (13%) and possession of anti-Soviet
literature (7.7%). 143
This same document also provided a basic demographic breakdown of convictions
under article 58-10 in 1957. It showed that workers accounted for 46.8% of all
sentences, followed by white-collar workers (18.3%), collective farm workers (9.9%)
and miscellaneous – such as pensioners and invalids – (25.0%). 144 In regard to age,
the review showed only that 17.4% of those convicted were less than 24 years of age,
67.2% were between 24 and 40 years of age and the remaining 15.4% were over 40
years old. 145 By some way the greatest number of those sentenced were Russians
(957 convictions), followed in numerical order by Ukrainians (443), Lithuanians (68)
and Belarusian’s (65). 146
Although not mentioned in the document, it is also worth pointing out that well over
90% of those convicted were men. Whether this reflected that women were less likely
to be involved in dissenting behaviour or were simply less likely to be sent to jail for
‘anti-Soviet activity and propaganda’ is unclear, though it seems likely that both
would have been true to a considerable extent.
143
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, ll. 17-18.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 6.
145
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 6.
146
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 5. A complete breakdown of sentences by union republic is
provided in chapter 2.
144
74
In some ways these statistics undoubtedly reflect the priorities of the campaign
against dissent that was underway at the time rather than presenting an accurate
snapshot of which elements of society were the most likely to be involved in protest
and criticism. For example, the breakdown of convictions by age seems to imply that
people under 24 years old were no more inclined toward dissenting behaviour than
were other age groups, but what it actually shows is that the authorities usually
resisted using custodial sentences against young people in all but the most serious
cases. 147 The question of how far these figures represented a true picture of increased
dissenting behaviour or one that was distorted by the ongoing campaign is discussed
at more length in the following chapter. However, with a reasonably large sample of
cases, one can put some faith in the general trends that the report demonstrated:
arguably the most notable of which was that, unlike in later years, dissent was a
surprisingly diverse social phenomenon.
1.4.5 SPONTANEOUS OUTBURSTS
If one were to draw a composite picture of a ‘typical’ act of dissent in light of the
above statistics it would reveal a lone individual engaging in a single, oral outburst
against the regime. In the vast majority of cases these ‘oral expressions of a counterrevolutionary nature’ were not made in the form of considered and critical remarks at
Party meetings like those in the aftermath of the Secret Speech, but can better be
described as hooligan-type outbursts. They were practically always spontaneous and
were usually fuelled by one or more of the following three factors: clashes with the
individual representatives of the regime (most commonly the militia), difficult
personal circumstances and drunkenness.
147
See G. Kuzovkin, ‘Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniya po politicheskim motivam v period
rannei ‘ottepeli’’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds, Korni travy, pp. 88-126.
75
These clashes often contained quite sharp political expressions such as threats to kill
communists or members of the government but in fact seem to have belied little or no
deep-seated dissatisfaction at the political situation, or at least did not reflect any
genuine intention to act on such dissatisfaction. Such outbursts can essentially be
seen as a continuation of the kinds of crude dissenting behaviour that Sarah Davies
and others have shown existed during the Stalin era. As far as the Soviet authorities
were concerned, this kind of protest proved to be the more easily manageable.
In late 1956 and early 1957 these spontaneous outbursts often cited the uprising in
Hungary as an example to be copied in the USSR. Yu. L. Rozman’s outburst in a
shop in the Transcarpathian oblast’, in which he demanded that people should ‘beat
communists like in Hungary’ 148 and I.V. Yaniv’s declaration, in a Drogobych bus
station café, that ‘communists should be attacked and overthrown as they are being in
Hungary’, are just two examples from a great many in which individuals were
sentenced for remarks referring to the Hungarian rising. 149 However, it seems that in
many cases events in Hungary were merely a timely point of reference rather than the
root of deep-seated anger among those who engaged in this kind of public attack on
the authorities. Like many others, there is no evidence in the respective case files of
Rozman and Yaniv to suggest that either actually showed any genuine support for the
revolution in Hungary. 150 The statements that were made by both of them celebrated
violence and protest more than they did the cause of the Hungarian rebels.
148
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 88957, l. 1. The Transcarpathian oblast’ was a region where tensions
were extraordinarily high owing to its proximity to Hungary.
149
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 87486, ll. 1-2.
150
In fact, it is probable that most Soviet citizens either supported the suppression of the Hungarian
rising or were ambivalent about it. This was not just because of the impact of state propaganda
branding the events a ‘counter-revolutionary uprising’ but also, according to Zhores Medvedev,
because it was only a little over a decade previously that Hungary had been one of Nazi Germany’s
staunchest allies and fighting there had resulted in the death of countless Soviet soldiers. As such they
were not regarded in the same manner as ‘real friends’ such as Czechoslovakia, for example.
76
Public eruptions of anger that did not refer to Hungary around this time often included
themes such as threatening to side with the US in the ‘forthcoming’ war that was
widely rumoured to be on the horizon in the late 1950s, criticism of privileges enjoyed
by political elites, unfavourable comparisons between the standard of living in the
Soviet Union and the West, branding members of the militia as ‘fascists’ and
‘Beriaites’ or more general slogans such as ‘down with the Soviet regime’ or threats
and abuse aimed at communists.
One quite typical example was the case against Aleksei Lepekhin, an invalid from
Astrakhan oblast’, who was arrested in August 1957 after stealing a shirt, trousers and
a pair of shoes from a man who had passed out in the street whilst drunk. Upon being
confronted by a member of the militia, and later whilst in detention at the militia
station, Lepekhin made a series of highly political statements that led to him being
convicted for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.
The testimony of fellow
prisoners, members of the public and militia staff attributed the following remarks to
Lepekhin: ‘I lived better under the (Nazi) occupation’, ‘Communists do not give us
the freedom to live’, ‘Khrushchev and Bulganin are strangling the working class’ and
‘Down with the Soviet Union, long live Eisenhower’: the last statement being shouted
out of an open window at the militia station. 151
These public outbursts occupy an interesting place in the wider spectrum of dissenting
behaviour and it is worthwhile to consider what can be deduced from such
occurrences. They were clearly not the kind of purposive and persistent acts of
dissent that would usually indicate genuine opposition to the regime. Nor were they
151
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 84518, ll. 4-6.
77
anything like the principled and brave defence of others that characterised human
rights dissent during the Brezhnev era.
Nonetheless, declaring a hatred of
communists or publicly calling for the overthrow of the leadership clearly was a
serious act of dissent in its own right, whether there was any real desire for such an
occurrence or not.
For people to have made such outspoken, and ultimately
dangerous, remarks apparently in the absence of genuine opposition to the regime
seems rather surprising. Again, it is hard to avoid reaching the conclusion that this
was partly a reflection of declining fear and respect for authority.
That socio-economic issues such as poverty and unemployment could become so
sharply politicised probably indicated more than anything else the extent to which
politics, in the form of language, rituals and symbols, was so entrenched and
inescapable in everyday life that it quickly became a target for criticism and abuse in
hard times. To a considerable extent it was, therefore, the Soviet system itself that
caused grievances which were, in certain respects, typical all around the world (such
as unemployment or poor housing conditions) to take on such a politicised form at
this time. In later years the authorities’ were far more successful at ensuring that
passive discontent did not translate into this kind of public activity.
The frequency with which drunkenness was reported in such instances is clearly not
without significance. However, alcohol had been a feature of Soviet and Russian life
for many years before Khrushchev came to power. Numerous sources suggest that
drunkenness and alcoholism were phenomena which actually became more acute in
the Brezhnev years, yet they do not seem to have led to similar behaviours on any
78
comparable scale. 152 Again, it is important to look to the changing dynamics of the
relationship between society and the regime at this point. Neither the widespread
physical repression of the Stalin era nor the relative material prosperity of the
Brezhnev years existed at this point. Once the utopianism that had been engendered
by the Secret Speech faded, it left something of a hole in the authorities’ means of
social control. By the end of the 1950s, however, a new system was being put into
place that helped to re-establish popular compliance and minimise dissenting
behaviour that lasted throughout the Brezhnev era and beyond.
Drunkenness does not in itself automatically imply that there was no genuine political
disenchantment underlying such outbursts, however. In the words of the Russian
proverb: chto u trezvoga v golove, to u p’yanogo na yazyke (approximately – ‘what a
sober man thinks, a drunk man says’). One’s intuition and experience would suggest
that there is probably some credibility in this proverb but one can say little more than
that with any confidence. What we do know from the case files of such individuals,
however, is that very few of those who were arrested and sentenced on the basis of
these kinds of outbursts were found to be involved in any other kind of dissenting
activity at that time or later, suggesting that these were acts of protest inspired by
temporary factors rather than a more fundamental sense of political discontent.
Alcohol and anger may have helped to turn passive discontent into active dissent, yet
in most cases this was very much a temporary transformation.
152
See, for example, Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life. It is possible that such instances did
continue to occur in the Brezhnev years but have not yet come to the attention of historians. As and
when detailed information on the application of prophylactic measures (see chapter 4) becomes
available it will be possible to give a more definitive assessment on this question.
79
Despite the fact that such acts of criticism and abuse were often only superficially
political they were not entirely without danger for the authorities. Had the growth of
public outbursts been allowed to go unchecked it is entirely possible that the problem
could have taken on serious proportions and begun to erode the still predominantly
submissive social order inside the USSR. This was a fact that the highest authorities
privately acknowledged according to Mark Kramer. 153 As the Hungarian rising had
demonstrated, matters could spiral out of control very quickly where so many pent-up
frustrations were present.
1.5 UNDERGROUND DISSENTING ACTIVITY
Underground activity represented what could be seen as a more purposive form of
political dissent and, despite the latter’s insistence on open activity, also the genre
from which one can trace many connections to the Brezhnev era dissident movement.
On the whole it was carried out by individuals and groups consciously acting on
ideological grievances against the authorities or certain of their policies.
Anonymous dissent was far more likely to be repeated in occurrence (partly because
of the generally more hostile nature of its participants but also because of the
protection offered by anonymity) and, therefore, more dangerous in the eyes of the
authorities because of that.
153
Kramer, ‘The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland’, p. 195.
80
1.5.1 ANTI-SOVIET LEAFLETS
Anti-Soviet leaflets (listovki) were probably the most consistently widespread
manifestations of political dissent under Khrushchev. 154 The total number that were
produced and distributed undoubtedly ran into hundreds of thousands and possible
even millions over the course of the entire period. They were discovered by the KGB
in practically every large and medium sized town throughout the Soviet Union,
sometimes pasted up on the walls and windows of public buildings or scattered on
public transport, furtively left in mailboxes, or simply handed out in the street. Some
were manifestos of underground political groups, information on strikes and disorders
around the country, appeals to the people to rise up against the regime, transcriptions
of foreign radio broadcasts or simply slogans and crude attacks against the regime and
certain of its representatives. 155
After 1956, state holidays and official events continued to witness an increased level
of dissenting activity, yet open acts of protest – such as Lazaryants’ interruption of the
7 November parade in Yaroslavl – were notably absent. The 1957 anniversary of the
revolution, for example, saw significant numbers of leaflets discovered in numerous
major cities around the Soviet Union. In Moscow, anti-Soviet leaflets were found in
the Luzhniki sports stadium, on a police car bonnet and pasted to the wall of a militia
station. Further cases of anti-Soviet leaflets being uncovered that day were reported
154
Whether the phenomena existed on any kind of scale under Stalin and Brezhnev is as yet unclear. It
seems likely that the boom in political samizdat literature would have supplanted the format in later
years, however.
155
It is worthwhile here to refer back to the leaflets produced by Boris Generozov, cited on page 18.
Further examples of anti-Soviet leaflets are cited at some length in chapter 3.
81
in Leningrad, Riga, Kaliningrad, Minsk, Brest, Kiev, Donetsk, Poltava Vilnius and
Stanislav. 156
Elections for the Councils of Workers’ Deputies in March 1957 gave an early
indication of this trend toward clandestine protest, with posters attacking the Soviet
leadership and ‘fraudulent’ elections being found attached to buildings in Sumy and at
the library of Kiev State University among other places.157
Several Ministry of
Internal Affairs reports spoke of voters openly tearing up and burning ballot cards,
refusing to vote and publicly insulting or threatening the candidates. 158 Similarly,
KGB reports show that elections to the ‘People’s Courts’ in December 1957 led to
minor disturbances in Moscow, threats against candidates in Kiev and anti-Soviet
leaflets being stuffed into a ballot box in Perm. 159
The main reason that state anniversaries and elections witnessed a notable rise in the
level of dissenting activity seems to have been that these were the few occasions when
Soviet citizens were expected to perform the basic rituals that demonstrated their
outward support for the regime. This was, therefore, the time when dissent was most
visible and would most offend the authorities’ sensibilities.
After assessing a sample of 50 cases involving anti-Soviet leaflets during 1956 and
1957 the Procuracy categorised their contents in the following way:
156
Aksiutin, ‘Popular Responses to Khrushchev’, p. 198.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 18, d. 37, ll. 1-3.
158
RGANI, f. 89, op. 18, d. 37, ll. 1-3.
159
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 231, ll. 122-124.
157
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Leaflets containing calls to overthrow the regime or attempting to provoke uprisings
and strikes.
Leaflets containing slander against the leaders of the Party and government.
Leaflets containing slander against the democratic principles of Soviet society, the
rights and freedoms of the Soviet people and calls not to believe Soviet radio and
press. 160
At this early stage of the Khrushchev era it is notable that leaflets tended to be hand
written and reproduced in quite small quantities of around half a dozen copies or less.
Although often few in number, the contents of such leaflets tended to be particularly
sharp. On 30 December 1956 Semen Atamanenko was jailed in Leningrad after
producing and pasting up a leaflet which read ‘Comrade Workers! The Hungarian
people are calling on you to follow their example!’ 161 In Riga, A.V. Kanakhin was
arrested in May 1956 after distributing 17 leaflets that said ‘Down with Soviet
imperialism! Down with communist propaganda and terror!’ 162 In Zhitomir oblast’
V.A. Demchenko pasted 19 leaflets onto the walls of public buildings that read ‘Down
with the Soviet regime! Down with Communists!’ 163
1.5.2 ANONYMOUS LETTERS
Anonymous anti-Soviet letters (anonimiki) were another phenomenon that
characterised dissenting activity during the Khrushchev years. Most frequently these
letters were addressed to political organisations such as the Central Committee,
individual representatives of the regime, editors of newspapers and journals or
managers of industrial enterprises. In later years they were also sent abroad, either to
160
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 26. Unfortunately, the review in question did not give any details
on which of these trends were the most prevalent.
161
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 76946, l. 1.
162
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 26.
163
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, ll. 27-29.
83
the ‘safe’ addresses in Germany and Holland that were broadcast by stations such as
Radio Liberty or to foreign political figures, embassies and organisations. Numerous
case files of individuals convicted for this offence clearly demonstrate that the
dissenters responsible often sent such letters repeatedly, and sometimes over several
years, until they were tracked down.
One typical anonymous letter, sent to Aleksandr Shelepin (the First Secretary of the
Komsomol) at the end of 1956, included a vehement attack on official propaganda. It
read: ‘…you say black is white. Prices are supposed to be coming down but you are
skinning people’, ‘it is no surprise that there has been trouble in Poland, Hungary and
Germany, we have suffered even longer’ and ‘stop writing and talking about the
happiness of the people. It is insulting that we know the opposite is true. Nowhere in
the world do people live worse’. 164
Another particularly interesting case was reported to the Central Committee on 12
December 1957. The letters editor of the newspaper Trud, Dmitrii Kiselev, was
arrested after sending a series of anonymous anti-Soviet letters that, according to the
KGB, ‘slandered government activity and policy, said the people were starving and
the Party does not care’. He also called for the entire leadership to resign and for
them to be expelled from the Party. Kiselev wrote and sent 22 such letters in total
between February and August 1957, addressing them to government bodies, industrial
enterprises and delegations from capitalist countries at the 1957 World Youth
Festival. 165
164
165
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, ll. 81-84.
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, ll. 106-107.
84
On the whole one can view anti-Soviet letters as an inherently less hostile form of
dissent than leaflets – the goal of which was usually to provoke a response from
among the wider population. That letters were usually intended for private audiences
whereas leaflets were intended for public consumption is a key distinction. The risks
involved in producing and distributing leaflets must also have been considerably
greater than those of simply writing and posting a letter, again showing that the
former represented a more resolute form of dissenting activity. Nonetheless, the fact
that many of those sentenced had sent multiple letters, sometimes over a period of
several years, highlights the fact that this was still a considered and planned act of
protest.
It is useful to explore briefly the question of what the people who wrote such letters
hoped to achieve by doing so. For those writing to political figures and organisations
outside of the Soviet Union or to bodies such as the Central Committee Presidium it
seems unlikely that they could have realistically expected their letters to reach the
target destination, even less so to change anything at all if they did get there. Those
who wrote letters to newspapers and journals attacking Soviet policy or abusing
Khrushchev would most likely have known that their letters would never be printed.
Why send a letter calling for struggle against the regime to the address of what must
surely be one of the least receptive audiences for such an appeal? The answer seems
to be that such letters were essentially a means of registering protest and attempting to
embarrass the authorities rather than anything more purposive.
Not all critical letters were anonymous, however. One interesting example from this
time was written by eleven Lithuanian workers and sent to Khrushchev in mid-1958.
85
It began by stating that ‘we wanted to be part of the Soviet Union but it is terrible’, it
explained that several years had gone by in Kaunas without sugar or meat and
declared that ‘he who works is hungry, while he who steals is able to live’. 166
According to Kozlov and Mironenko, young people were more likely to affix their
names to such letters than were older people – something that was certainly true in
this instance. 167 This may well have been related to the fact that people of around 30
years or older had lived through such extensive state repression and naturally
remained cautious of the state’s repressive apparatus.
It may also have said
something about the naivety and impetuousness of youth.
This distinction between generations has already been touched upon in reference to
the emerging ‘fathers and sons debate’. As will be shown in chapter 2, the authorities
feared that young people were becoming disconnected from the Soviet system and
lacked ‘revolutionary commitment’. In actual fact, it seems that young people and
others were not growing disillusioned with the ideals of communism but were
growing disenchanted by the conservatism and hypocrisy of the authorities in the late
1950s. In later years this did begin to spread to flagging enthusiasm for communism
in general but, as the massive number of young people who volunteered to work on
the Virgin Lands campaign and the predominance of Marxist-Leninism among young
dissenters testified, the idealistic appeal of the communist project was still a powerful
force at this point.
One of the most important developments that can be seen in regard to the relationship
between society and the state at this time is a growth in the mistrust and cynicism with
166
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, ll. 62-63.
V. Kozlov and S. Mironenko eds, Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 19531982, Moskva: ‘Materik’, 2005, p. 229.
167
86
which people viewed the activities and pronouncements of the authorities. One can
see that this process was at least partly fuelled by Soviet society’s growing interaction
with the outside world, whether in the form of meeting foreign visitors (mostly
restricted to a few major cities), reading newspapers from the People’s Democracies
or listening to Western radio broadcasts. The 1957 World Youth Festival appears to
have been a particularly notable turning point in this respect. What all of this meant
was that doubts about the rightness of the Soviet course or about the truthfulness of
official propaganda were increasingly confirmed and crystallised – a process that the
authorities proved singularly unable to reverse.
1.5.3 UNDERGROUND GROUPS
At the most extreme end of this cynicism and resistance to authority were those who
engaged in underground group activity. As Shlapentokh has written: ‘The people
know from birth that any attempt to create an unofficial organisation is considered by
the authorities as a direct threat to the regime and those participating in meetings
convened by such an organisation take a serious risk’. 168 Nonetheless, dozens of
underground groups were uncovered by the KGB in the second half of the 1950s.
However, although they offered strident criticism of the authorities on a range of
themes, few groups were calling for revolution at this stage.
In most cases the activities and achievements of such groups were extremely limited.
Usually they consisted of only three or four members and were uncovered by the
KGB within a few months of being formed, during which time they had often
168
Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life, p. 124.
87
managed only to agree upon a manifesto and to distribute leaflets on a handful of
occasions. 169 In all but a few cases they did not tend to have formal organizational
structures or regulations of membership because of their small size and generally
informal nature – reflecting the fact that many of these groups were founded on the
basis of already existing friendships circles.
Still, there was little indication of genuinely anti-communist sentiment behind such
groups. Most considered that the regime had become stagnant and sought to create, or
recreate, a form of ‘true communism’ sometimes called neo-Leninism or neoBolshevism. The names of several such groups are a testament of their political
leanings: ‘the Worker-Peasant Underground Party’, ‘the Socialist Party of the Soviet
Union’ and ‘the Party of Struggle for the Realisation of Leninist Ideas’. 170 Although
a particularly dangerous form of activity for those who participated, one still ought to
be cautious in viewing such people as determined, revolutionary-type figures. For
example, Valery Ronkin recalled the case of some friends who planned to form their
own group in the late 1950s: ‘They definitely believed that any kind of anti-Party
position would, in the first instance, lead to girls and Western music’. 171 One gets the
impression that there was also a certain joie de vivre as well as political dissatisfaction
among young dissenters.
This actually raises an important point in regard to dissenters during the period,
particularly in regard to establishing a distinction with the well-known dissidents of
the Brezhnev era, such as Andrei Sakharov, whose lives were, to a considerable
169
L. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. 295.
170
Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola, p. 326.
171
Ronkin, Na smenu dekabryam, p. 152.
88
extent, defined by the fact that they were dissidents. Like Ronkin, Eduard Kuznetsov
also recalled that although he was angered by events in Hungary, politics came second
to sports and socialising for him at that time. 172 In other words, dissent was not yet a
‘lifestyle choice’ at this stage.
Two of the early Khrushchev period’s most notable underground groups were based
around Revolt Pimenov and Lev Krasnopevtsev in Leningrad and Moscow
respectively. The Pimenov group was founded in Leningrad in December of 1956 as
a result of anger at the suppression of the Hungarian rising.
Pimenov, a
mathematician at Leningrad State University, had previously prepared and distributed
samizdat copies of the Secret Speech and sent letters to deputies of the Supreme
Soviet demanding the withdrawal of troops from Hungary and criticising the
authorities among friends. He then made the acquaintance of Boris Vail’, a student at
the Leningrad Bibliotechnical Institute, who had been preparing and distributing antiSoviet leaflets since 1955.
On Pimenov’s initiative the pair formed a group including several of Vail’s student
colleagues from the Leningrad Bibliotechnical Institute and Pimenov’s common-law
wife Tat’yana Verblovskaya. All but Pimenov were members of either the CPSU or
Komsomol and were idealistic communists. 173 Vail’ arranged three group meetings,
two at the Bibliotechnical Institute in December 1956 and a third at Mars Field in
Leningrad during January 1957. At the first meeting Pimenov declared that Stalinist
policies were still in place in the Soviet Union, that there was neither freedom of
speech nor of the press and that the workers were not the true masters in the Soviet
172
Interview with Eduard Kuznetsov in Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’, p. 214.
It has already been mentioned earlier in the present chapter that Pimenov had begun to consider
joining the Communist Party in the wake of the Secret Speech.
173
89
system. He then attacked the kolkhoz system and stated that the Yugoslav method of
agricultural development was superior to the Soviet system. 174
Where this group differed from others was that they briefly succeeded in establishing
a secondary cell in Kursk, Boris Vail’s hometown. Vail’ had visited in January 1957
and persuaded his friend Konstantin Danilov to create an organisation along the same
lines as his own in Leningrad.
According to the KGB investigation protocol,
subsequent correspondence between the pair showed that Vail’ urged Danilov to study
Marx, to learn ‘Bolshevik methods of struggle and conspiracy’ and to gather fake
documents such as passports, tickets and licenses.
Further letters from Vail’ included leaflets for Danilov’s group to distribute, with the
slogan ‘land to the peasants, factories to the workers and culture to the intelligentsia’
and a request for the group there to work out a programme of anti-Soviet activity. 175
According to Vail’s letters, the overall aim was to create as many cells as possible and
eventually to hold a conference in order to plan a wide programme of anti-Soviet
activity. 176 As it transpired, one of the group members, Vladimir Vishnyakov, had
been ‘turned’ by the KGB and both the Leningrad and Kursk cells were quickly
uncovered and neutralised.
The Krasnopevtsev group was based around Moscow State University; its members
were teachers, students and recent graduates (six of whom were Komsomol members
and one a full CPSU member). Like the Pimenov group, they were inspired by events
in Hungary.
They prepared materials on the ‘true history of the CPSU’ and
174
GARF, f. 8131 op. 31, d. 73957, ll. 32-41.
Pimenov, Vospominaniya, p. 85.
176
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 73957, l. 66.
175
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distributed leaflets around the city and scattered them on buses, in the latter case
approximately 300 that called for reform ‘in the spirit of the XX Congress’, and held a
meeting at Izmailovskii Park in Moscow.
The most significant activity of this group as far as the authorities were concerned
was in its attempt to establish contacts with several foreigners ‘in order to further their
aims of changing the present system’. 177 In April of 1957 Krasnopevtsev met with a
Pole named Lyasotoi for a discussion of how the pair could work together against
their respective governments, according to the KGB investigation protocol. 178 In
August 1957 group member Vadim Kozovoi established contact with the Englishman
Julian Watts – a British intelligence officer according to the KGB – at the World
Youth Festival and attempted to pass him damaging information about the USSR. 179
Soon after Watts, contact was made with a Frenchman named Lerasno, to whom they
apparently passed ‘sensitive information’ about the ‘anti-Party affair’ at the 1957 June
plenum (obtained by group member Kozovoi, whose father was a Party
functionary). 180
In both of the above cases and many others like them at the time, the group members
did not fashion themselves as alternative political parties, and did not speak of
overthrowing the regime but instead sought to strive for democratisation and to
expose its shortcomings and lies. Speaking at his trial, Lev Krasnopevtsev admitted
that the group had done everything they were accused of but denied that they had ever
177
It is unclear from the case file whether the phrase ‘in order to further their aims of changing the
present system’ was a direct quote from the testimony of a group member or a KGB summary of their
activity. As such it should be regarded with some caution.
178
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 73957, l. 49.
179
The KGB reports do not specify what was in this ‘harmful information’ though it seems likely that it
was the same information that was subsequently passed to Lerasno.
180
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 79866, ll. 1-110.
91
been ‘anti-Soviet’ in their intent. 181
This was to be a line of defence that was
employed by many dissenters during the Khrushchev period and after.
In
Krasnopevtsev’s case, and most others, it proved to be entirely unsuccessful in
averting a harsh punitive response. 182
These traits were quite common among intelligentsia dissenters of this time in
particular.
By the second half of the Khrushchev period, underground groups
increasingly spoke of violence and revolution but this was rarely the case in the late
1950s. Maurice Hindus illustrated this point when, after a lengthy visit to Russia in
1957, he concluded that ‘The intellectual underground into which the student or any
inquiring youth moves produces only talk; protests, parodies, anecdotes, songs for the
relief of his frustration; it hides no guns, manufactures no bombs’. 183
1.6 CONCLUSIONS
The most notable theme that can be drawn from dissent in the first half of the
Khrushchev period is that there was very little anti-communist sentiment or desire for
revolution even among the regime’s critics. Worker dissent tended to be based upon
anger at hard material conditions while intelligentsia dissent was characterised by a
desire to ‘fix’ the system rather than to overthrow it. The sense of utopianism that the
Secret Speech had re-ignited not only evaporated after the Hungarian rising but
exacerbated the sense of disenchantment that it created. Those critics who were not
intimidated into silence by the authorities increasingly began to move further and
181
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 79865, ll. 1-34.
For example, this was a defence similar to that employed by the writers Sinyavsky and Daniel
almost a decade later.
183
Hindus, House Without a Roof, p. 383.
182
92
further away from a position of loyal support and questioned more fundamental
aspects of the regime and its ideology.
What underpinned the majority of strident criticism and protest, especially among the
intelligentsia but also among workers, was the realisation that it had become possible
to dissent and still survive.
The XX Party Congress had been the single most
important factor in demonstrating this to be the case yet the fitful liberalisation that
followed it left many doubly disenchanted. What this shows is that Khrushchev’s
exposure of Stalin did not by itself fatally undermine the system, nor was the painful
legacy of the Gulag an entirely insurmountable obstacle.
Many dissenters at that
time wanted to tackle these problems and move forward rather than condemn the
Soviet project to failure. It was the unwillingness to fulfil the tacit promise of
liberalisation offered by the Secret Speech that pushed anti-Stalinists into acts of
protest and dissent, from where they steadily moved further and further away from the
regime.
The influence that the Secret Speech had upon dissenting behaviour is one of the most
informative aspects of the period, particularly when viewed in the context of the
subsequent Hungarian rising. It is interesting to note that it was the Soviet invasion of
Hungary rather than the exposure of Stalin that provoked the most widespread and
vociferous criticism. The two were, of course, inextricably linked. It was the Secret
Speech that clearly lowered the price to be paid for acts of criticism and
simultaneously raised hopes of liberalisation but it was the events in Hungary that
caused frustrations to crystallise and spill over into impassioned dissent.
93
Active dissenters constituted a small minority within the overall Soviet population yet
the biographical data held in the files of the Procurator’s office shows that acts of
protest and criticism were by no means dominated by the Moscow intelligentsia, as
they later seem to have become. All areas of the country and all social classes
witnessed some degree of dissent. Nonetheless, workers and the intelligentsia showed
practically no inclination to work together either during this period or later.
There is also an interesting point to be raised in the fact that elements of society
sometimes responded positively in support of the regime’s critics in the early
Khrushchev period. Reports from the Department of Party Organs and the Komsomol
show that in many instances audience members met dissenting speeches with great
enthusiasm. Evidently, there was some considerable discontent among many of those
who had some interest in political life. Fear of the authorities had declined notably
over the previous half-decade, though it probably still remained one of the more
important factors that constrained people’s behaviour in this respect.
One can also see that the first half of the Khrushchev era was a time in which the
parameters of the new relationship between society and the regime were being set out.
Dissenters were at the vanguard in establishing where these new boundaries of
permissible and impermissible lay. With the confusion and uncertainty caused by the
Secret Speech this was a process that was at its most dynamic in 1956 but then
became ever less so as the extent to which the political environment had changed
since Stalin’s death became clearer with the passing months.
94
CHAPTER 2
OFFICIAL RESPONSES TO DISSENT: 1956-1958
As Elena Papovyan has asserted: ‘for people who are not normally interested in the
subject, repression in the second half of the 1950s causes amazement’.
1
As has already been stated, political persecution under Khrushchev is a theme that
has attracted rather limited attention, especially in comparison to the preceding and
succeeding periods of Soviet history. In fact, the total of 3,764 sentences for antiSoviet activity and propaganda that were handed out between 1956 and 1958 far
exceeded that of any other period of the post-Stalin era. Unsurprisingly then, it is one
of the central arguments of the present chapter that depictions of the Khrushchev era
as one of ‘thaw’ are not entirely applicable in this respect.
Official responses to infractions of acceptable comment had undoubtedly become
markedly less draconian but the scope for criticism remained almost as narrow.
Entirely groundless state violence had been largely reined in but a considerable
volume of repressive activity remained. William Henry Chamberlain’s assessment
that the Soviet Union had changed ‘from a terror state to a strict police state’ is
perhaps the most applicable. 2
Policy against dissent was a dynamic field of activity in the first half of the
Khrushchev era as solutions were sought for behaviours that, to a large extent,
1
E. Papovyan, ‘Primenenie stat’i 58-10 UK RSFSR v 1957-1958 gg. po materialam Verkhovnogo
Suda SSSR i Prokuratury SSSR v GARF’, in L.S. Eremina and E.B. Zhemkova eds, Korni travy:
sbornik statei molodykh istorikov, Moskva: Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, 1996, p. 73.
2
W. Chamberlain, ‘USSR: How Much Change Since Stalin?’, Russian Review, Vol. 22, No. 3, July
1963, p. 228.
95
constituted fundamentally new challenges for a regime in the process of adapting to
the new post-Stalin, post-terror environment. What one can see during the second
half of the 1950s is essentially a process of experimentation by trial and error in
regard to the policing of dissent. Different approaches were employed and mistakes
learned from before an effective corpus of policy began to crystallise from around the
end of the decade.
Inside the regime one can clearly see that, although the leadership were rarely
involved in responding to specific cases of protest and criticism, they were
consistently well informed about such occurrences and continued to set the general
tone of repressive policy. This is not a field in which one encounters the clear-cut
divisions between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ within the leadership as was
sometimes the case with cultural policy, for example. Even quite mild political
criticism was still equated with opposition at this stage in particular.
It is also clear that the second half of the 1950s in particular witnessed a degree of
inter-institutional competition – specifically between the KGB and the legal
establishment – that had a direct impact on the way in which a corpus of policy
against dissent was constructed over the course of this short period. At the grassroots
level, where the leadership initially demanded that dissenting behaviour receive an
appropriate response, there was some confusion in regard to how to police dissent in
the new, post-Stalin and post-Secret Speech environment, leading to numerous
inconsistencies.
96
Preserving domestic stability remained the one priority that stood above all others,
suggesting that the tone of official responses to acts of protest and criticism gives an
insight into how concerned the authorities were in regard to the threat posed by
dissent at any given time. Nonetheless, the authorities had begun striving to reduce
and control dissenting behaviour rather than to attempt its complete eradication by
force – something that would have demanded a great deal of effort and repression. In
this, one can see not only that pragmatism dominated over ideological considerations
in terms of responses to dissent but also that this was a key part of a fundamentally
new social contract that was being established between the state and the people it
ruled over. The authorities were keen to avoid provoking resentment within society
and tacitly came to accept that they were no longer able to impose their will with
virtual impunity.
Many of the basic assumptions that the leadership made in regard to dissent were
either essentially correct or can at least be viewed as eminently logical. However,
they were also frequently unsophisticated and inappropriate in their application, often
pushing the authorities into exaggerated and unhelpful responses to dissenting
behaviour. Nonetheless, the evidence shows that the policies against dissent that were
pursued under Khrushchev ultimately paid dividends by reining in the growth of both
intelligentsia and worker dissent. What this meant, however, was that the grievances
that existed within society were stifled rather than remedied.
One of the most important themes to be noted is that of change and continuity. One
can see this period as a time in which Soviet repressive policy was in the later stages
of the transition away from Stalinism, with its reliance on crude methods of social
97
control such as labour camps and prisons. Looking to the succeeding Brezhnev
period, it is also possible to draw a number of fundamental continuities in regard to
official attitudes and responses to dissent that were put forward already in the early
Khrushchev years and lasted for most of the following three decades.
2.1 RESPONSES TO DISSENT PRIOR TO THE XX CONGRESS
One need only look to the imprisonment of Alexander Radishchev after the
publication of A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1790 or Nicholas I’s
infamous Third Department to see that intolerance toward criticism of the ruling
authorities was by no means a specific product of the October Revolution. Nor, for
that matter, was it a phenomenon restricted to the Russian Empire and the USSR.
Suppression of dissenting opinion has always been the bedrock of even far less
authoritarian regimes than the USSR under Khrushchev.
Nonetheless, to
contemporary Western observers, and to many historians who study the post-Soviet
states, the stifling of protest and criticism is one of the most prominent features of the
Soviet regime.
2.1.1 THE PUBLIC FACE OF POLITICAL PERSECUTION
Before entering into a discussion of official responses to dissent, it is firstly
instructive to elaborate upon the public facet of the authorities’ attitudes toward
dissenters throughout the Soviet period.
Here the regime consistently strove to
maintain an image of the USSR as a progressive and tolerant state. Most notably for
the period at hand, there were numerous instances during his time as leader of the
98
Soviet Union when Khrushchev insisted that there were no longer any political
prisoners in the USSR; something that he almost unquestionably knew not to be the
case. 3
Even more strikingly, on 27 January 1964 the Soviet representative to the UN on
human rights issues, Boris Ivanov, voted in favour of two motions that proclaimed
‘every citizen’s right to freedom of expression and opinion; the right to freedom of
peaceful assembly and association’ and ‘every citizen’s right to leave any country,
including his own, and to return to that country’. 4 These were, of course, complete
fallacies that were not to materialise until decades after Khrushchev’s ouster.
This was entirely in keeping with a long history of disinformation and propaganda on
the theme of the regime’s attitudes toward its critics. In a gesture loaded with even
more irony than that of Boris Ivanov, the Stalin regime had refused to ratify the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it ‘did not go far
enough’. 5 Similarly, in the Brezhnev years the Soviet Union signed the 1975 Helsinki
Accords with little or no intention of fulfilling the numerous human rights clauses of
the so-called ‘Third Basket’. 6 Gorbachev too, initially engaged in the same process of
misinformation, like Khrushchev insisting that there were no longer any political
prisoners in the USSR until Anatoly Marchenko’s death in Chistopol prison, in
3
See W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2003, p. 303. Perhaps the
most notable instance in which he made this statement was from the rostrum at the XXI CPSU
Congress in January 1959.
4
HU OSA, 300-80-1, Box 688.
5
HU OSA, 300-80-1, Box 688.
6
The contents of the Helsinki Accords were divided into three ‘baskets’. The first basket was
concerned with the post-Second World War national borders throughout Europe, the second with
various aspects of co-operation between East and West and the third with human rights issues.
99
December 1986, prompted an international scandal. 7
Clearly then, the public
pronouncements of the Soviet regime over the years on this matter shared a common
thread of audacious levels of deception.
Successive Soviet leaders engaged in this practice of ritual dishonesty for a variety of
reasons. Occasionally intended for a domestic audience but more commonly used to
impress the outside world, in order to help win client states in Asia, Africa and Latin
America.
There were clear benefits for the regime in lying about what was a
consistently woeful record on civil liberties and domestic repression.
Clearly,
pragmatism had always been, and would always be, the key factor in the regime’s
public attitude toward protest and criticism.
2.1.2 FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE SECRET SPEECH
One of the best known examples of the way in which the new Bolshevik regime had
originally sought to deal with its critics could be seen in the deportation of academic
and cultural figures, the most notable of which was the renowned philosopher Nikolai
Berdyaev, on what came to be known as the ‘philosopher’s boat’ in 1922. 8 As Robert
Service has pointed out, from the very beginning ‘The deportations taught the
intelligentsia that no overt criticisms of the regime would be tolerated’. 9 Contrary to
7
Marchenko had been a member of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and had spent many years in
labour camps, jails and exile settlements. He achieved his most lasting impact as a dissident by writing
the samizdat book ‘My Testimony’, an account of his time spent in the Khrushchev era Gulag. The
exact cause of his death was not officially announced, but Marchenko had been engaged in a lengthy
hunger strike and been badly beaten by prison guards shortly prior to his death.
8
See L. Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer, London: St
Martin’s Press, 2007, and G. Arbatov, et al. eds, ‘Ochistim Rossiyu nadolgo…’: Repressii protiv
inakomyslyashchikh, konets 1921 – nachalo 1923, Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiya’,
2008.
9
R. Service, A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin Books, 2003, p.
137.
100
what the Khrushchev era’s neo-Bolshevik dissenters seem to have believed, the Lenin
years were certainly not free of political persecution. However, those who were
considered essentially loyal but ‘misguided’ were often responded to in a different
fashion. For example, it was generally the case that dissenting Bolsheviks were
subjected to admonition rather than punishment, with mitigating factors taken into
account. 10 Those who were seen as enemies, on the other hand, were still liable to
face ‘revolutionary justice’.
From the late 1920s onwards, official attitudes toward dissenters became markedly
more severe, with terms such as ‘enemies of the people’ increasingly bandied about in
official rhetoric. Characteristic of the crude and Manichean legal processes of the
time, even off-the-cuff remarks such as ‘I wish Stalin were dead’ could be deemed the
equivalent of an attempted assassination and accordingly punished as terrorism while
practically any kind of protest or criticism was branded as the work of Trotskyists,
SRs or anarchists. 11
Debates about how many people were executed, jailed or otherwise repressed in the
Stalin years fall outside of the scope of the present work but what is important is the
fact that a large proportion of such cases were entirely baseless and apparently at
random. Unsurprisingly, the number of annual convictions for political crimes was
high, especially in the immediate post-war years as the authorities pursued reprisals
against real or supposed former collaborators and nationalist guerrillas in the Ukraine
and the Baltic States, often handing out sentences of twenty-five years in such cases.
10
See, for example, O. Kharkhodin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices,
London: University of California Press, 1999, p. 37.
11
See S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent 1934-1941,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 5.
101
However, the number of sentences for counter-revolutionary crimes was actually in
quite pronounced decline during Stalin’s last years, dropping from 129,826
convictions in 1946 to 69,233 in 1948 to 53,179 in 1950 and finally 27,098
convictions in 1952. 12 Knowing that Stalin took a close personal interest in the work
of the security organs, it seems doubtful that such a marked drop in sentences could
have occurred without his assent yet there seems to be no evidence that his last years
were characterised by a more liberal side to his thinking; quite the opposite in fact.
Most likely this decline in convictions for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda could
be attributed to the fact that the campaign against Baltic and Ukrainian guerrillas and
collaborators was winding down as the number left at liberty declined. There is also a
possibility that fabricated political cases were simply being replaced by fabricated
criminal cases.
That the high-profile and entirely invented ‘Doctors’ Plot’ was immediately
disbanded by Stalin’s successors and the first few Gulag inmates were soon released
augured well for the future, as did the break up of Beria’s powerful MVD apparatus.
From approximately this point onwards the volume of entirely groundless convictions
declined greatly. Basic improvements were made to the legal system whereby the
notorious troikas were abolished, the accused were allowed access to a lawyer and the
state’s reliance on free Gulag labour (which had necessitated a steady supply of
convictions) was ended. 13 This is not to say that investigations and trials became
unbiased or that the authorities’ responses to dissent were reasonable but that the
process at least became more predictable and did not tend to touch upon those who
12
Y. Gorlizki and O. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 125.
13
Some of the best coverage on the breaking up of the MVD and on reforms to the Soviet legal system
after Stalin’s death can be found in M. Lewin, The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005.
102
kept silent. Many problems remained though, most notably in the way that the legal
apparatus enjoyed practically no independence from the dictates of the Communist
Party leadership.
The years of collective leadership continued to witness a consistent and marked drop
in annual sentences under article 58 for counter-revolutionary crimes, from 2,124 in
1954 to 1,069 in 1955 and 623 in 1956. 14 What this demonstrates is that the practice
of showing greater restraint in punishing dissent was not simply a product of the XX
CPSU Congress or of Khrushchev’s apparently liberal political leanings but that it had
actually been in progress virtually since Stalin’s death and certainly before
Khrushchev had risen to dominance over his rivals.
This suggests that the declining level of repression on the basis of anti-Soviet activity
during the years of collective leadership, with numerous arch-Stalinists at the apex of
power, was not a product of a more liberal atmosphere in the wake of the Secret
Speech. As Gorlizki and Khlevnyuk have shown, the authorities were well aware of
the threat posed by looming economic and demographic crises arising from the mass
repression of the Stalin era. 15 However, the refusal of successive amnesties to release
those jailed on political charges, the brutal suppression of the camp rebellion at
Kengir in 1954 and the anti-religious drive of the same year demonstrated that the
14
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 3. Article 58-10 was the name employed only in the RSFSR
criminal code since no overall Soviet code existed. Other union republics had different code numbers
for the same article but for reasons of clarity and consistency the titlw ’58-10’ is used throughout this
thesis.
15
See Gorlizki and Khlevnyuk, Cold Peace.
103
regime remained intolerant and capable of resorting to violence in order to enforce its
will. 16
Furthermore, Stalin’s successors were from the very start aware that the relationship
between state and society had changed following his death. While ‘scared’ may well
be too strong a word, one could at least say that the new leaders were highly
apprehensive about society’s mood on coming to power.
As Leonard Schapiro
pointed out: ‘the leaders of the Party had graphically summed up their own view on
the state of popular feeling towards the Party when, immediately after Stalin’s death,
they spoke of the need for measures to prevent disorder and panic’.17
2.2 AFTER THE XX CONGRESS
Surprisingly, no concrete plans were established before or immediately after the
Secret Speech in regard of how to police popular responses to it. Ekaterina Furtseva –
at the time a member of the Central Committee Secretariat and later a full Presidium
member – admitted to this lack of planning when she said that: ‘after the XX
Congress we were not ready to give a response when the remarks began to come’. 18
In all likelihood this lack of pre-planning was a result of the short timescale that
existed between the decision for Khrushchev to deliver Pospelov’s report on Stalin to
the Congress and the actual event taking place. It also demonstrated one of the central
characteristics of policy against dissent in the early Khrushchev years: the authorities
16
The most detailed account of the Kengir camp rising can be found in A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag
Archipelago, Vol. 3, London: Collins/Fontana, 1978.
17
L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1970, p. 608.
18
E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy 1945-1964, Moskva: Izdatel’skii tsentr ‘Rossiya molodaya’,
1993, p. 136. Zubkova cites her source for this as RTsKhIDNI, f. 556, op. 1, d. 693. Furtseva is
probably best known for being one of very few women to rise to the very highest levels of political
power and for occupying the position of Culture Minister, which she did between 1960 and 1974.
104
were rarely proactive in seeking to forestall outbursts of criticism and protest but
instead responded to them afterwards.
In later years there would be a more
sophisticated and integrated approach to preventing and punishing dissent but the
early Khrushchev period was essentially characterised by ‘fire-fighting’.
Khrushchev’s memoirs – not always the most reliable source but in this instance
supported by other accounts – tell us that fellow members of the collective leadership,
particularly Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov, had strongly resisted his
proposal to deliver the report on Stalin at the XX Congress. They reportedly claimed
that it would do untold damage to the regime and said that, ‘We will be called to
account.
The Party will assume the right to call us to account…we’ll be held
responsible for it all’. 19 With at least a few of its members already in a state of some
trepidation over the potential consequences of the report, it is entirely unsurprising
that the Politburo took an active interest in monitoring the lists of comments and
questions that arose at the meetings held to discuss the Secret Speech around the
country. 20
2.2.1 RESPONDING TO DISCUSSIONS OF THE SECRET SPEECH
It is interesting to note that when reports of dissenting remarks that took place at
meetings held to discuss the Secret Speech reached the centre, the response was, in
Soviet terms, still rather measured. This vindicates Elena Papovyan’s assertion that
19
See S. Khrushchev ed. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev Volume 2: Reformer, 1945-1964,
Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006, pp. 209-10. Among other sources,
Khrushchev’s account is supported by Aleksandr Pyzhikov in Khrushchevskaya ottepel’, Moskva:
Olma Press, 2002.
20
See E. Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient Russians,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. The list of questions submitted at meetings held to discuss the
Secret Speech, cited in chapter 1, demonstrates this point.
105
1956 was characterised by ‘an unusual liberalism in the punitive organs’. 21 This was
largely true yet, as mentioned earlier in the present chapter, political repression had
already been dropping markedly since Stalin’s death. The restraint was, therefore,
indicative of a trend that had already been in place for some time, even though the
problem of critical speeches in particular was essentially a new one.
At the lower levels of the Party there were a number of factors that dictated these
restrained responses to dissent. Firstly, according to Polly Jones, Party activists and
officials were usually too deeply embroiled in the rituals of criticism and selfcriticism to act decisively and promptly. 22 Secondly, the ‘chasm of uncertainty’ that
had facilitated some of the dissenting behaviour of the time also took hold in local
Party organisations. If, as Yuri Orlov asserted, people everywhere were still ‘holding
their fingers in the wind’, then it was evident that the wind was blowing against the
Stalinists and to pursue vigorous repression at this stage would clearly not have been a
sensible move.
In later months and years the KGB was consistently at the vanguard of the struggle
against dissent, yet for the most part they remained inactive in the wake of the Secret
Speech. Although very much a client of Khrushchev (the pair had worked together in
wartime Ukraine) the presiding KGB chairman, Ivan Serov, was by no means a liberal
and was in fact one of the louder voices insisting that a hard line had to be taken
against dissenters. 23 That the newly constituted KGB had been charged with leading
the struggle against protest and criticism could be seen in the 15 February 1954
21
Papovyan, ‘Primenenie stati 58-10’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds. Korni travy, p. 73.
P. Jones, ‘From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin’ in P. Jones ed. The Dilemmas of DeStalinization: Negotiating Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 46.
23
See, for example, N. Petrov, Ivan Serov: Pervyi predsedatel’ KGB, Moskva: Materik, 2005; Y.
Albats, KGB: State Within a State, London: I.B. Tauris, 1995.
22
106
Central Committee resolution ‘On the Formation of the Committee for State Security
(KGB) under the Council of Ministers’ which defined one of the organisation’s
principal roles as being ‘struggle against the enemy activity of any kind of anti-Soviet
elements inside the USSR’. 24 One can point to the ongoing aim of the Party, and
Khrushchev in particular, to bring the security organs to heel as the reason for their
relative inactivity at this time. Until sanctioned by the Party to take action, the KGB
were forced to wait.
Summaries of discussions that took place in all union republics were compiled and
sent to the Central Committee by the Department of Party Organs. 25 The leadership
cannot have been unconcerned by the negative reports reaching them after such a long
period of conformism within the Party ranks. According to Erik Kulavig, reports from
local Party branches quickly convinced the top leadership that even the limited
liberalisation that had taken place had already shaken the foundations of the system. 26
This seems like an exaggeration, however, as later events would show that when the
authorities perceived any potential threat to the regime’s stability they were far
quicker to act decisively than was the case at this point in time. Nonetheless, it is
evident from this interest in monitoring the public mood that, unlike in previous
times, popular opinion had come to matter more to the Soviet leadership and that it
was ultimately to have a major impact on policy formulation.
One of the first attempts by the authorities to silence critics was a letter sent out to
Party organisations in response to events at the Thermo-Technical Institute discussed
24
RGANI, f. 3, op. 8, d. 84, l. 18.
See K. Aimermakher et al eds. Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX s’ezde
KPSS: Dokumenty, Moskva: Rosspen, 2002.
26
Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev, p. 16.
25
107
in chapter 1. However, having gone into some detail in describing the events that
took place at the meeting in question, it is worthwhile to return briefly to the subject
in order to describe the official response that followed.
2.2.2 THE THERMO-TECHNICAL INSTITUTE: REVISITED
It has already been mentioned in the previous chapter that members of the Party cell at
the Thermo-Technical Institute were presented with a motion to censure the critical
speeches that had been made by Orlov, Arvalov, Nesterov and Shedrin, but most
refused to condemn the quartet. In this Party cell, and others like it at the time, the
vote on whether to condemn the dissenters’ remarks was deemed insufficiently
supportive of the motion and the entire cell was subsequently disbanded. A raft of
similar instances around the country showed that the Party leadership feared the
existence of genuinely sizeable resistance within certain Party cells.27 Those deemed
to be ‘harmful elements’ were then expelled from the Party and the remaining
‘healthy’ elements would be re-registered with other local groups. This last point
serves to flag up the kind of imagery that the regime often used to characterise
dissenters: ‘unhealthy’ and ‘contagious’ elements in an otherwise healthy society.
One of the more unique aspects of the authorities’ response to the meeting at the
Thermo-Technical Institute was that the fate of the four speakers was decided at the
very top of the political hierarchy. According to Orlov, the head of the institute,
Abram Alikhanov, informed the quartet that, 'I telephoned Khrushchev on your behalf
but he said that he was not the only member of the Politburo. Other members
27
Jones, ‘From the Secret Speech’, in Jones ed. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, p. 47.
108
demanded your arrest. He told me “they should be glad that they got off with
dismissals”’. 28 It is entirely likely that the wave of critical responses to the Secret
Speech had left Khrushchev in a weakened position within the leadership yet it seems
disingenuous to suggest that he was entirely powerless on the matter.
The foursome undoubtedly did gain a measure of protection from the fact that they
were talented physicists, and therefore particularly useful to the regime, rather than
ordinary members of the public. 29 Furthermore, for the regime to launch a harsh
response would have risked alienating the wider scientific community just as the
nuclear arms race was gathering momentum. It is quite clear that this was a case in
which both liberalisation and rationalisation played an important part.
Fedor Burlatsky has gone on record as stating that Mikhail Suslov, the ultraconservative ideologue, was the driving force behind putative moves to have the four
arrested. 30 Although there was a degree of personal animosity between Burlatsky and
Suslov, there is little doubt that the latter may well have taken it upon himself to play
a personal role in responding to dissent. A further example of this kind of behaviour
on Suslov’s part was demonstrated by his personal involvement in conducting an
investigation into uncovering the authors of a December 1956 article in a university
newspaper on students who had been expelled from their institute. 31
28
Yu. Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs of a Russian Life, New York: William Morrow and
Company, 1991, p. 121.
29
Yuri Orlov denied the rumour that Igor Kurchatov, ‘the father of the Soviet atom bomb’, also
intervened on behalf of the four, threatening to retire from all scientific work if they were jailed.
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, December 2006.
30
F. Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring: The Era of Khrushchev Through the Eyes of
his Adviser, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991 p. 72. Suslov and Burlatsky had particularly
different ideological beliefs – in the Soviet context – and this led to a series of clashes during the
Khrushchev years before Burlatsky was sidelined under the Brezhnev regime.
31
V. Ronkin, Na smenu dekabryam prikhodit yanvari…, Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Zven’ya, 2003, p. 98. It
is also worth noting here that recent works have pinpointed Suslov as the figure whose intrigues led to
109
Members of the Party and state leadership generally did not involve themselves in
such affairs, however. This was perhaps a result of the leadership wanting to avoid
getting ‘blood on their hands’ again: something that Khrushchev had employed to
powerful effect in his rivalry with those more deeply implicated in Stalin’s crimes,
such as Molotov and Malenkov. It should also be pointed out that members of the
leadership had many of their own ministerial and Party concerns and tended not to
encroach upon other fields of responsibility without invitation.
Nonetheless, as
matters in December of 1956 would subsequently demonstrate, it was the Central
Committee Presidium that continued to prescribe the broad tone of political repression
in spite of their minimal day-to-day involvement in the matter.
On 5 April 1956, Pravda carried an editorial attacking the quartet of young physicists,
claiming that they had ‘sung with the voices of Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries’. 32 With both of those political groups having been effectively wiped
out in the USSR over two decades previously, this would probably have meant little to
much of the population but it did betray more than a hint of the language that had
been used in the Stalin years. 33 More significantly, as stated in chapter 1, the media
attack largely failed to provoke public indignation at the four and instead gave rise to
approving comments. The lesson was soon learned by the authorities and media
references to dissenters vanished for a time before later re-appearing with a tone of
moral rather than ideological condemnation. 34
Khrushchev’s notorious attack on non-conformist artists at the Manezh gallery in December 1962,
mentioned in chapter 3. See, for example, M. Zezina, Sovetskaya khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya i
vlast’ v 1950-1960 xx, Moskva: Dialog MGU, 1999; Yu. Gerchuk, Krovoizliyanie v MOSKh, ili
Khrushcheve v Manezhe 1 dekabrya 1962 goda, Moskva: NLO, 2008.
32
Pravda, 5 April 1956.
33
Orlov himself wrote that he knew very little about either the Mensheviks or Socialist
Revolutionaries. See Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts, p. 121.
34
This remained the case throughout the Brezhnev years. For example, Aleksandr Ginzburg was
characterised as a drunkard and Yuri Orlov as an uncaring father. Elena Bonner, in particular, was
110
2.2.3 THE BOUNDARIES OF PERMISSIBLE AND IMPERMISSIBLE
What then lay inside, outside and on the edges of these new boundaries of permitted
behaviour? S.V. Mironenko has argued that scope for the expression of alternative
views had actually ‘not changed one iota’ after the Secret Speech. He has asserted
that the most significant impact of the XX Congress was that those who did not
transgress the boundaries of acceptable comment and behaviour were no longer in
danger of repression. 35 Mironenko’s assertion is not without some validity, though it
seems that a better argument would go beyond the question of repression no longer
touching upon innocent citizens and suggest that, although the scope for expressing
criticism had not changed, what the authorities deemed an appropriate response to
these criticisms had clearly become far less severe. Still though, the matter was one
of rationalisation just as much as it was about liberalisation.
In fact there was a limited degree of acceptable criticism in the Khrushchev years that
had not existed under Stalin. Most famously there were numerous examples of
authors such as Vladimir Dudintsev, Lev Pomerantsev and Ilya Ehrenburg who
published work in the first half of the Khrushchev period that presented a degree of
criticism on themes including poor living conditions among the peasantry,
bureaucratic abuse of power and the stifling influence of Socialist Realism on Soviet
cultural life. However, this was an avenue of criticism that could be somewhat
unpredictable, as shown by the publication of Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone in
autumn 1956 which initially met an enthusiastic popular response only to be followed
subjected to a long running and vicious smear campaign in the 1970s and 1980s that depicted her as
leading her husband, Andrei Sakharov, astray.
35
V. Kozlov and S. Mironenko eds, Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 19531982, Moskva: ‘Materik’, 2005, p. 29.
111
by the author’s subsequent mauling at the hands of conservatives and later by
Khrushchev himself.
Often viewed by scholars as having had the function of a safety valve intended to vent
the frustrations of the liberal intelligentsia, this was one area where it clearly was
possible to point to an ongoing internecine struggle between liberals and
conservatives within the corridors of power. 36 Whether the publication of a few
liberal works had in fact helped to appease the frustrated intelligentsia cannot be
proved for certain, yet some memoirs from the period do suggest this to have been the
case. 37 It is also noteworthy that as the authorities stemmed the flow of critical works
being published in journals such as Novyi Mir dissent became an increasingly
intelligentsia-dominated phenomenon.
This was not an avenue in which the ordinary citizen was able to participate in any
active capacity, however. Broadly speaking, there were two spheres of acceptable
criticism open to the general public.
The first of which was mild criticism of
proposed policies that were not yet in force (once in force, there was to be no further
debate on their merits or otherwise). The second avenue was censure of specific
abuses of power by individuals at the lower levels of the political spectrum. 38 One
could see the former in the public consultation campaigns of the period and the latter
occasionally appearing in the letters sections of newspapers and journals, for example.
The most important point was that such letters and comments were not to be aimed at
36
The literature on this theme is particularly voluminous in both English and Russian. Two of the best
works are P. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964, Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1965 and Zezina, Sovetskaya khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya i vlast’.
37
See, for example, L. Alexeyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the PostStalin Era, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
38
See C. Kenney, ‘The Twentieth CPSU Congress and the ‘New’ Soviet Union’, The Western Political
Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3, September 1956, pp. 570-606.
112
the top leadership nor seen to be directed at undermining the foundations of the Party
or its decisions, but must be ‘businesslike in character’ according to Voprosy partiinoi
raboty – an authoritative collection of official articles and editorials on ideological
developments. 39
The political and social order, along with the economic system, were the most
explicitly forbidden themes of criticism. 40 What these subjects instantly implied to
the authorities was the presence of deep-seated hostility toward the fundamental
principles of Soviet rule: a not entirely unfounded, though undoubtedly extreme,
viewpoint. In addition to these three subjects, one can also add the broad theme of
‘the West’ as a subject that could only be broached in a negative manner. Because the
authorities saw citizens’ attitudes toward the West as a key indicator of their political
loyalty, it naturally followed that any kind of dissenting behaviour involving the
West, such as negative comparisons between the standard of living in the Soviet
Union and the US or attempts to communicate with foreign organisations, instantly
made any transgression more dangerous.
There were also certain ‘grey areas’ to these new boundaries. For example, Kozlov
has cited the fact that there was no legal definition of what constituted a ‘counterrevolutionary organisation’ as proof that in fact the authorities purposely did not
establish complete clarity of the rules. 41 The main reason for this was that a degree of
uncertainty often prompts caution. This could also be seen in later years when
psychiatric confinement was employed against dissenters apparently at random,
39
Voprosy partiinoi raboty, Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stov politicheskoi literatury,1957, p. 48.
V. Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990, p. 78.
41
Kozlov and Mironenko eds Kramola, p. 31.
40
113
meaning that all acts of dissent theoretically carried the risk of indefinite detention:
undoubtedly a powerful deterrent.
2.2.4 RESTORING DISCIPLINE IN THE PARTY
On 5 April the Central Committee Presidium issued a secret resolution to be
circulated among Party organisations entitled ‘On the harmful attacks at the meeting
of the Thermo-Technical laboratory of the USSR Academy of Sciences Party
organisation’. It said that although the majority of meetings had passed in the desired
manner ‘the Central Committee has noted that there have been individual cases of
harmful speeches by anti-Party elements that have tried to employ criticism and selfcriticism for their own aims’. It accused the quartet of trying to use the discussion
session to discredit the Party and Soviet state, acknowledged that the majority of those
present had refused to condemn their remarks and criticised the leadership of the Party
cell for failing to give a decisive response.42
Another Party letter demanding an end to internal criticism was sent out on 16 June,
entitled ‘On the results of discussions on the decisions of the XX Party Congress’. On
30 June the Central Committee issued a further decree: ‘On the overcoming of the
Cult of Personality and its consequences’. 43 According to Susanne Schattenberg, this
decree in particular was intended as a threat to those who persisted in their
‘exaggerated’ criticism at Party meetings. 44 As Gennadyi Kuzovkin has stated, the
overall purpose of these letters was to demonstrate the new limits of acceptable
42
RGANI, f. 3, op. 14, d. 13, ll. 76-79.
RGANI, f. 3, op. 14, d. 37, ll. 1-25.
44
S. Schattenberg, ‘‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’? How the Secret Speech Was Translated into
Everyday Life’, in Jones ed. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, p. 66.
43
114
criticism and discussion, to judge proper from improper in the new environment, and
to establish that punishment would follow any transgression of these boundaries. 45
Kulavig has cited figures to show that between 1954 and 1961 a total of 550 CPSU
members were expelled on the grounds of ‘participation in anti-Party groups’, almost
1,000 were expelled for ‘anti-Party conversations’ and almost 900 for ‘lack of
political conviction’. 46 Although they do give some idea as to the scale of Party
expulsions, the timescale covered in Kulavig’s figures is too broad for any detailed
analysis of responses to discussions of the Secret Speech. Very few CPSU and
Komsomol members were jailed as a result of remarks made at Party meetings and
discussions.
This does not indicate that inner-Party criticism had become more
acceptable but that the level of response which was deemed appropriate in such
instances had been lowered considerably. Again, it is worth emphasising the contrast
with the likely responses to public criticism that would have occurred in the Stalin
years. That such events were practically unheard of in the later Khrushchev years and
during the Brezhnev period is a testament to the authorities’ success not just in
purging the CPSU of ‘undesirable elements’ during this period but also in clearly
establishing powerful sanctions to dissuade other potential critics.
The case of the Party meeting in Levoberezhnyi raion of Kuibyshev oblast’,
mentioned in chapter 1, reflected some of the main practices in policing dissent within
the Party at that time. The leadership of the Party cell in question was deemed to have
failed in its duty to provide a sufficiently decisive rebuff against its critics, and the
Kuibyshev gorkom eventually took control of the matter. It handed out expulsions or
45
G. Kuzovkin, ‘Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniya po politicheskim, motivam v period rannei
‘ottepeli’’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds, Korni travy, p. 90.
46
Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev, p. 88.
115
severe reprimands to all of those who had made critical remarks or asked questions
that were judged ‘provocative’.
Because of their weak response to the original
incident, the organisation’s buro was also disbanded. 47
The above case reflects the fact that the authorities in Moscow were regularly
dissatisfied with the way that local Party organisations failed to respond to members’
critical remarks with sufficient vigour. As Polly Jones has observed, the leadership in
Moscow at times seemed more angered by the local authorities’ failure to detect and
deal with anti-Soviet sentiment than by the dissenting outbursts themselves. 48 Clearly
then, the letters sent out by the Central Committee in the Spring and Summer of 1956
had been vital in establishing where the new boundaries of permitted behaviour were not just for ordinary Party members but also for those who were charged with policing
dissent.
The aim was not to uncover those of differing opinions, as in the Stalin era, nor to
persuade them of the rightness of the Party line, but to enforce silence upon them.
This was not quite the return to Leninism that Khrushchev had promised but it was
still a major divergence from the excesses of Stalinism. The tactic was, to a large
extent, successful. From the end of 1956 there were relatively few traces of open
criticism within the ranks of the CPSU. With only a handful of exceptions, open
criticism was not heard within the Party again for many years. The result was that
most disgruntled members suppressed their frustration, but a minority chose to move
toward underground activity instead.
47
48
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 5, l. 3.
Jones, ‘From the Secret Speech’ in Jones ed. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, p. 44.
116
Already then, one can start to see an implicit acceptance of ‘doublethink’ whereby
hostile or critical opinions and beliefs were no longer the concern of the authorities
unless they were manifested in some way. Even though the state was becoming evermore intrusive into the everyday lives of its citizens, it no longer concerned itself with
their thoughts if they were not manifested in protest activity. The matter was clearly
one of managing dissent rather than completely eradicating it. This does not suggest
that the authorities felt any more tolerant to alternative views but that there existed
neither the will nor the means to attempt the physical eradication of all critics.
2.2.5 RESTORING DISCIPLINE IN THE KOMSOMOL
Young people in particular became the subject of the regime’s attention by the second
half of 1956. Along with released prisoners and members of the artistic intelligentsia,
the young generation was seen as being among the most likely sources of domestic
strife. The authorities spoke of problems such as insufficient respect for the value of
labour and for the Soviet revolutionary heritage, particularly looking to the children of
the burgeoning middle classes as the root of the problem. 49 However, in this the
regime almost entirely failed to engage with the real issues that were causing disquiet
among Soviet youth, such as the strenuous demands that the Komsomol placed upon
its members, the generation gap that had been opened up by the Secret Speech and the
poor living conditions endured by students. 50
49
See J. Fürst, ‘The Arrival of Spring?’ in Jones ed. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization.
Komsomol members were not only expected to attend the organisation’s meetings but also to take
part in various groups and committees as well as undertaking civic work in the local area. When added
to a demanding school or university schedule, many tried to avoid their Komsomol duties.
50
117
This concern was linked to the authorities’ eminently logical fear that it was among
young people that harmful bourgeois propaganda would have its biggest impact as
Western fashions and culture began to appear in the USSR. The 1957 World Youth
Festival in particular posed a major headache for the regime in this respect: it had the
potential to generate fantastic propaganda successes but also meant bringing the
negative influence of thousands of foreigners into the USSR for the first time.
Frederick Barghoorn has argued that ‘the regime saw itself as the moral shepherd of a
naïve society’. 51 This may well be true. After years of isolation much of Soviet
society was indeed naïve about the outside world, but it is also the case that much
dissent among young and old was entirely organic in origin and adhered to MarxistLeninist political philosophy. 52
Blaming discontent among young people on the
influence of the West was an easy solution but it was not entirely the correct one.
The content of a January 1957 report from Komsomol secretary Shelepin to the CPSU
Central Committee suggested that within the Komsomol there was some trace of
Khrushchev’s putative ‘return to Leninism’. According to Shelepin, emphasis was
being placed on educating those who were ‘misguided’ rather than simply taking
punitive measures against them. Noting that a mood of pessimism and ‘apoliticism’
had emerged since the XX Congress, he wrote that political-ideological work among
young people was being strengthened across all union republics, that agitators,
teachers, workers and veterans of the revolution were being dispatched to work
51
F. Barghoorn, ‘Observations on Contemporary Soviet Political Attitudes’, Soviet Studies, Vol.18,
No.1, July 1966, p. 68.
52
The impression of Soviet society as naïve about the true state of affairs in the world comes across
particularly clear in accounts by Zinaida Schakovsky and Maurice Hindus, both of whom travelled
around the Soviet Union for several months in the second half of the 1950s. See Z. Schakovsky, The
Privilege Was Mine, London: Jonathon Cape, 1959 and M. Hindus, House Without a Roof: Russia
After Forty Three Years of Revolution, London: Victor Gollancz, 1962.
118
places, student dormitories, canteens and classrooms to explain the Party line and to
provide a rebuff to bourgeois propaganda. 53
Stronger measures were also put in place, however. Directors of Higher Education
Institutes were empowered to expel students and to withhold their stipends if they
were involved in any kind of dissenting behaviour.
Pressure was increased on
teachers to monitor their students and those deemed ‘unworthy of the title “student”’
were to be expelled and assigned productive labour tasks instead of academic studies
and not permitted to enrol at another higher education institute for two to three
years. 54 Unfortunately, it seems that figures on expulsions from universities and other
higher education institutes were either not kept at the time or have simply failed to
come to light for one reason or another. It is worth referring the reader back to the
previous chapter, in which a Daily Mail article claiming that around 1,000 MGU
students were expelled in connection with the Hungarian rising was cited. 55 Even a
very conservative estimate suggests that this would have equated to perhaps 10,000
students at least across the country as a whole, and potentially a great many more.
The authorities were probably correct in viewing young people as a source of
potential disquiet and were, in fact, largely successful in stifling the expression of
discontent in that sector of society. Moreover, this process was carried out with
minimal recourse to political sentencing and corrective labour. It was becoming clear
to the authorities that they did not always need to ‘use a sledgehammer to crack a
walnut’: the threat of expulsion from university or from the Komsomol was often
53
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 233, ll. 1-73.
See Kuzovkin, ‘Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniya’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds, Korni
travy, pp. 88-126.
55
Daily Mail, 5 December 1956. It is also important to reiterate the reservations that were originally
expressed about the figures presented in this article.
54
119
sufficiently powerful to change someone’s behaviour. In later years this principle was
to be applied across society as a whole.
Although some labour camps did continue to function, Khrushchev’s denial that there
were any political prisoners in the USSR effectively took away their function as a
deterrent from dissenting behaviour. 56 Instead, new sanctions were established that
proved able to constrain people’s behaviour without overt repressive activity, such as
the loss of a job along with any accrued privileges or expulsion from the Party or
Komsomol – which invariably entailed losing one’s job and being debarred from all
but the lowest paid positions in the future. These new sanctions also demonstrate the
greater subtlety of the post-Stalin approach to social control that was being
established. While this was undoubtedly an effective method of ensuring popular
compliance in the short and medium term, it was not a genuine cure to the regime’s
ills.
The threat of expulsion from the Communist Party and the Komsomol were powerful
stimuli that should not be underestimated. Furthermore, the threat of imprisonment
still hung over those who were expelled from the Party and Komsomol.
Comprehensive statistics on expulsions from the Komsomol relating to dissent have
yet to be made available, though there are some highly informative scraps of
information in the archives:
56
Accounts of the period by the likes of Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quite clearly
indicate that people generally believed Khrushchev’s boasts about there being no more political
prisoners. See Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, p. 71 and A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag
Archipelago, Part 3: London, Collins/Fontana, 1978, p. 476.
120
Table 2.1 Annual expulsions from the Ukrainian Komsomol, 1956-1958.
1956
1957
1958
Oblast’
Zaporozhskaya
539
274
57
Khersonskaya
376
161
48
Nikolaevskaya
444
290
66
Krymskaya
978
275
88
Odesskaya
1,057
628
113
Luganskaya
2,532
641
207
Stalinskaya
2,903
1,286
270
Dnepropetrovskaya
1,298
550
128
Kirovogradskaya
307
222
38
Kievskaya
902
451
99
Chernigovskaya
391
364
59
Source: Department of Komsomol Organs. RGASPI, f. 1, op. 33, d. 1690, ll. 32-35
The first trend that one will immediately notice in the above table is the extent to
which the volume of expulsions decreased significantly from 1956 to 1957 and then
from 1957 to 1958, suggesting that 1956 was a year in which expulsions were
unusually high. This is a pattern that is supported in one of the few other pieces of
statistical information on Komsomol expulsions.
121
Table 2.2 Annual expulsions from the Kazakh and Uzbek Komsomol
organisations, 1955-1957.
Union Republic
1955
1956
1957
Kazakh
2,593
3,001
2,169
Uzbek
1,649
1,875
627
Source: Department of Komsomol Organs. RGASPI, f. 1, op. 33, d. 1690, l. 11 and d.
1722, l. 81
.
Unfortunately, both of the above tables only give data on overall expulsions from the
Komsomol and there were naturally a variety of grounds on which one could be
ejected. However, Kuzovkin’s work on the regime’s struggle against dissent within
the Komsomol and figures that clearly show a surge of expulsions across three
separate union republics in 1956 make it safe to conclude that the authorities were
indeed purging the Komsomol of dissenting voices around this time, even though they
were not being jailed.
The application of punitive measures against critics was soon about to be expanded
significantly as the regime moved from a default position of jailing only the most
strident and subversive critics to launching a wave of political arrests and sentences
that sought to re-impose discipline throughout wider society. With its mass powerbases of the Party and Komsomol already in the process of returning to outward
compliance by the end of 1956, the regime next turned its attention to the ordinary
citizenry.
122
2.3 THE DECEMBER LETTER
By November 1956 a meeting of the Central Committee Presidium saw the leadership
taking an increasingly aggressive tone toward ‘unhealthy elements’ in the student
body and elsewhere. The series of letters sent out to Party organisations by the
Central Committee appears to have stemmed the tide of misjudged criticism within
the CPSU and Komsomol, yet a considerable volume of dissent remained in wider
society. Restoring discipline among the Communist Party and its youth wing was
clearly not going to be enough to safeguard the regime’s stability. At the end of 1956
the ‘remarkable liberality’ in responses to criticism that Elena Papovyan referred to
was replaced by a major clampdown on dissent.
On 10 November, Pravda published a speech that Khrushchev had delivered to a
meeting of young people in which he explicitly linked the rebellious mood of students
with the developing events in Hungary: a theme that was soon to become central to
the policing of dissent. 57 With a major uprising in Berlin only three years previously,
and disturbances in Poland running concurrent with those in Hungary, the Eastern
Bloc was enduring arguably its most tumultuous period prior to the 1980s. Stalin’s
‘buffer zone’ against the West was beginning to look like a major source of political
instability.
57
See Kuzovkin, ‘Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniya’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds, Korni
travy, pp. 88-126.
123
2.3.1 FEARS OVER HUNGARY
Mark Kramer has argued that, already well aware of political ferment within the
USSR, the regime feared that events in Hungary could spill over into neighbouring
countries and ultimately into the Soviet Union, potentially unravelling the entire
socialist bloc if they did so. 58
The authorities’ judgement in this instance was
probably sound. Obviously one cannot say for sure that the entire region would have
descended into chaos if matters in Hungary had not been taken in hand by the Soviet
leadership, yet when one considers the way that events in one East European satellite
impacted on the next as the system rapidly began to collapse at the end of the 1980s it
gives some support to the regime’s assessment of events.
Khrushchev’s son-in-law, Aleksei Adzhubei, even suggested that social unrest within
the USSR itself had been one of the main catalysts for the decision to send Soviet
armed forces to suppress the Hungarian rising. 59 If the Soviet leadership had intended
their response to events in Hungary to demonstrate that protest and criticism would
not be tolerated in the USSR, the plan clearly backfired because it stoked even more
unrest at home. However, this was not the case everywhere. Stefani Sonntag, for
example, has argued that the impact of the Soviet invasion of Hungary played a role
in bringing an end to ongoing disturbances in Poland in late 1956. 60
Adzhubei’s assertion would clearly have major ramifications for the extent to which
we can consider the Soviet leadership to have been concerned about the level of
58
M. Kramer, ‘The Soviet Union and the 1956 Crises in Hungary and Poland: Reassessments and New
Findings’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33, No. 2, April 1998, p. 192.
59
A. Adzhubei, Te desyat’ let, Moskva: Sovetskaya Rossiya, 1989, p. 97.
60
S. Sontag, ‘Poland’ in D. Pollack and J. Wielgohs eds, Dissent and Opposition in Communist
Eastern Europe: Origins of Civil Society and Democratic Transition, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, p. 6.
124
protest and criticism around the country, yet there seems to be little evidence to
support this rather bold claim. His status as an insider in the Khrushchev family by no
means indicates that Adzhubei would have been privy to such information. On the
contrary, Sergei Khrushchev insisted that his father rarely ever spoke about such
matters at home. 61
Memoirs and documents produced by other members of the
political elite have also failed to offer any support for Adzhubei’s claim.
In his memoir of the era, which he spent working among the Soviet political elite,
Fedor Burlatsky suggested that Khrushchev had developed a ‘Hungary complex’ after
seeing the rapidity at which matters had spun entirely out of the authorities’ control
there. 62 Party functionaries too, were apparently in a state of some agitation and panic
around this time according to Zubkova. 63 Indeed, it would be particularly surprising
if there had not been a great deal of concern at the way events were unfolding in
Hungary as communists and members of the Hungarian security services were being
attacked and even killed in the streets by protesters.
It should also be noted that Mikhail Suslov, already shown to be an energetic
opponent of dissent, had been one of Khrushchev’s emissaries in Budapest and had
apparently been horrified by the chaos and anti-communist sentiment that he had
witnessed there. 64 KGB chief Ivan Serov too had been dispatched to Budapest for a
time during the rising. Key elements of the Soviet leadership, therefore, had tangible
61
Interview with Sergei Khrushchev, Rhode Island, December 2006.
See Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 85.
63
Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, p. 153.
64
V. Sebestyen, Twelve Days: Revolution 1956, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006, p. 121.
Although not an important figure in the struggle against dissent during the Khrushchev years it is also
particularly noteworthy that Yuri Andropov, the future KGB chairman of the Brezhnev era, was the
Soviet ambassador in Hungary at that time and had in fact resurrected what was a seemingly ailing
career by his handling of the uprising there.
62
125
experience of a regime on the edge of collapse. As subsequent developments were to
show, there may have been division within the leadership on a number of issues, and
particularly on the subject of whether to send troops into Hungary, but in the autumn
of 1956 there was undoubtedly a growing consensus among the leadership that dissent
had to be reined in at home. 65
The Soviet Union had been able to maintain its Hungarian satellite regime by force of
arms, but no power would be able to prop up the Soviet regime if a similar situation
were to arise inside the USSR: a fact that the leadership must have been painfully
aware of. As the superpower rivalry heated up, the Soviet regime could not be seen to
be in trouble. As Fursenko and Naftali have pointed out, ‘The Hungarian effect could
also be seen in the Kremlin’s hardening attitude toward political dissent at home’. 66
The form that this ‘hardening’ took was a campaign of legal repression against
dissenters, initiated by a secret Central Committee letter that was sent out to all Party
organisations on 19 December 1956, entitled ‘On the strengthening of the political
work of Party organisations in the masses and the suppression of attacks by antiSoviet enemy elements’. 67 As the KGB’s own internal history textbook, written in
1977, stated: ‘the December letter began a merciless (besposhadnyi) campaign against
anti-Soviet elements’. 68 The veteran sociologist and historian Boris Firsov has even
argued that the December letter was one of the key moments in the entire history of
65
Khrushchev vacillated for some time over the matter before eventually acceding to the exhortations
of Suslov and Serov, among others, and agreeing to sanction the use of force. The most strident
opponent of this move was Khrushchev’s long-time ally, Anastas Mikoyan.
66
A. Fursenko and T. Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Story of an American Adversary, New
York: W.W. Norton, 2006, p. 141.
67
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 2, ll. 1-15.
68
V. Chebrikov et al. Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti: uchebnik, Moskva:
Vysshaya krasnoznamenskaya shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri sovete ministerov
SSSR, 1977, p. 527.
126
the Soviet regime. 69
This may be a slight exaggeration but in regard to the
Khrushchev era it is undoubtedly true.
2.3.2 FORMULATING THE LETTER
The records of the Central Committee Presidium session held on 6 December show
that the subject of dissent was formally included on its agenda, the aim of which was
to produce a draft letter to be sent out to all Party organisations, KGB branches and
regional Procurators. 70
The list of those present at the session was as follows:
Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich, Georgy Malenkov, Anastas
Mikoyan, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Maksim Saburov, Mikhail
Pervukhin and Georgy Zhukov. These were, of course, all men who had risen to
positions of power under Stalin but that should not, in itself, be taken as a direct cause
behind the conservative turn that was about to follow in regard to social control. It
should also be remembered that, by virtue of their occupying high positions in the
Stalin years, these were figures who had first-hand knowledge of the problems that
unrestrained Stalinism had bequeathed the country and who had moved quickly to
bring the situation back under control after his death. 71
The principal question to be addressed was ‘What should be done with anti-Soviets
(antisovetchiki)?’ The minutes of the session show that Malenkov proposed the
strengthening of Party discipline, Molotov spoke of the need to improve propaganda
and overcome shortages, Mikoyan emphasised that the views of the Party must be
more clearly presented to the people and Khrushchev proposed increased monitoring
69
B. Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR 1940-1960 gody: Istoriya, teoriya i praktika, Sankt Peterburg:
Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt Peterburge, 2008, p. 261.
70
GARF, f. 3, op. 12, d. 1006, l. 54.
71
See Gorlizki and Khlevnyuk, Cold Peace.
127
of potentially hostile elements that had recently been released from the camps,
particularly Trotskyites. 72 The threat of rising unrest at home was a subject on which
it appears that there was minimal disagreement within an otherwise divided
leadership: Derek Watson described the session in question as having been
‘surprisingly united’. 73
From his vacillating over employing the use of force in response to events in
Hungary, and later at Novocherkassk, as well as his undoubted bravery in taking the
lead on exposing Stalin’s crimes, we can be reasonably certain that Khrushchev was
not by nature a leader inclined to large scale repression. Nonetheless, despite his
reputation as something of a risk-taker on the international stage, Khrushchev
consistently came down on the side of the hardliners when the question of domestic
stability arose. It therefore seems reasonable to speculate that he could have been
persuaded into giving his approval by conservative figures within the leadership such
as Suslov and Serov, the latter of whom was cited by Mikoyan as being someone able
to manipulate Khrushchev to his own ends. 74
It is not a new hypothesis to say that Khrushchev was an inconsistent promoter of
liberalisation yet it is a theme that is starkly presented here. His specific reference to
Trotskyites – who were never a genuine feature in dissenting behaviour at this time or
later – perhaps indicated that he too struggled to see beyond the impact of his
formative experiences during the Stalin period. As we will see again in the summer
of 1962, when faced with what was considered a potentially destabilising situation,
72
GARF, f. 3, op. 12, d. 1006, ll. 1-54.
D. Watson, Molotov: A Biography, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 259.
74
See A. Mikoyan, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniya o minuvshem. Moskva: Vagrius, 1999.
73
128
the Khrushchev regime was still ultimately liable to revert to large-scale repression
and violence in order to force the desired outcome.
The results of the 6 December session were passed down to a Central Committee
commission for editing before being transformed into a confidential Party letter. The
redrafting commission was headed by Leonid Brezhnev and included among others
Georgy Malenkov, Averkii Aristov, Nikolai Belyaev, Ivan Serov and Roman
Rudenko. 75 The commission met on 14 December to ‘exchange opinions’ on the
results of the Presidium session and to draft the letter that was to be sent out to all
Party organisations. 76
It is immediately noteworthy to point out that the combined make up of the two
bodies that were principally involved in the production of this letter (firstly the
Central Committee Presidium and then the drafting commission) effectively spanned
three successive administrations (those of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev), and this
was perhaps one of the main reasons why it is possible to see such strong links with
both the past and the future in the regime’s responses to dissent during the
Khrushchev period.
2.3.3 THE FINAL TEXT
The drafting was completed by 14 December and sent to the Presidium for final
approval.
The tone of the letter was actually softened slightly in redrafting –
75
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 1, ll. 1-15. At the time of the redrafting these men occupied positions of
Central Committee Secretary, Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, two Central Committee
secretaries and the heads of the KGB and Procuracy respectively.
76
RGANI, f. 3, op.14, d. 83, ll. 1-2.
129
specifically, a clause was added insisting that punishment should not be aimed at
people who were ‘mistaken’ rather than truly anti-Soviet – before the letter was
dispatched to all Party organisations five days later. In its very earliest lines the letter
asserted that the ‘present harmful atmosphere’ in the USSR was a product of events
taking place elsewhere, particularly in Hungary, where the imperialist powers had
increased their efforts to undermine the socialist camp. The ultimate goal of the West,
according to the letter, was the restoration of capitalism across Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union: a sufficiently apocalyptic threat that would justify the new direction. 77
The letter went on to upbraid local Party organisations for allowing instances of
criticism to go without a decisive and timely response and stated that bourgeois
elements were attempting to ‘hijack’ the struggle with the Cult of Personality for their
own ends. The real crux of the document could be found in statements such as ‘each
and every communist must play their part in fighting for the Party line and defending
its interests’ and ‘in the struggle against anti-Soviet elements we must be strong and
unrelenting’. 78
It is not hard to see why the KGB interpreted this as signalling a ‘merciless’ struggle
against dissenters, but such remarks were actually tempered somewhat in the letter.
For example, only a few lines below the comment about being ‘strong and
unrelenting’ toward anti-Soviet elements, a cautionary note was included that said ‘we
have to work on people who are being influenced by foreign propaganda, they should
not be automatically considered enemy elements’.79 This acceptance that dissenters
were not necessarily enemies but could simply be mistaken or naïve was a major
77
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 2, ll. 1-5.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 2, l. 12.
79
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 2, l. 12.
78
130
break with past doctrine but it also sent out conflicting signals to those who were
expected to do the policing at ground level. However, this clause went almost entirely
unheeded over the next eighteen months.
Whether or not it did so intentionally, the letter seriously misrepresented the situation
on the ground at several vital junctures. For example, the majority of dissenters at this
stage were not ‘bourgeois elements’ but often strongly adhered to Marxist-Leninist
ideological principles and were by no means ‘agents of imperialism’. This kind of
hyperbolic rhetoric bore little relation to the real state of affairs around the country.
Similarly, it is shown at various points throughout the thesis that although the Soviet
authorities were at least partly correct to see outside involvement in unrest across the
socialist camp, they consistently overstated the problem. The Eisenhower regime
spoke of pursuing a policy of ‘rolling back’ communism and rumours abounded that
the CIA had allocated millions of dollars to fund opposition groups inside the Soviet
Union yet no evidence has ever surfaced of any groups that received such material
assistance. 80
It is unclear whether the Soviet authorities truly believed in the scenario that they
presented in the December letter. Suslov’s biographer, Serge Petroff, has asserted that
he firmly believed the US to be the driving force behind the Soviet regime’s domestic
discontent, yet it remains unclear whether his colleagues felt the same way. 81 Other
sources have suggested that Khrushchev considered the Hungarian regime to be
80
In fact, the ethical questions that were raised by the station’s encouragement of the Hungarian rising
proved to be especially far-reaching after it was bloodily put down. One of the results was that Radio
Free Europe’s sister station changed its name from Radio Liberation to Radio Liberty, thus striking a
slightly less militant tone.
81
S. Petroff, The Red Eminence: A Biography of Mikhail A. Suslov, New Jersey: Kingston Press, 1988,
p. 117.
131
largely responsible for provoking the uprising on account of its ineptitude and
brutality. 82 The most important point was that, almost regardless of how the situation
had come about, Hungary had got completely out of hand and the same could not be
allowed to happen inside the USSR.
2.4 THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST DISSENT
One of the characteristic aspects of the Khrushchev years was the regime’s tendency
to undertake widespread, but often short-lived, campaigns in order to overcome its
problems. The struggle to cultivate the Virgin Lands of Siberia and Kazakhstan, the
battles against ‘social parasites’, religion and financial speculation, to name just a few,
were all conducted in this way. Unlike other campaigns, however, the struggle
against dissent was conducted without media fanfare and seems to have gone largely
unnoticed among the general population.
Although the Central Committee Presidium set the tone for the forthcoming
clampdown in the December Letter, responsibility for its implementation was placed
squarely with regional officials. Correctly perceiving that they had not only been
shown the green light to take measures against critics but also that there would be
negative consequences for themselves if they did not, local officials began to act. As
Boris Firsov has written: ‘…the call was heard. All the links of the Party and state
apparatus began to move and to reply, just like in the old days’. 83 The campaign that
followed was nowhere near the scale of the Great Terror of the late 1930s yet neither
82
83
See Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, p. 140.
Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, p. 261.
132
did it resemble the kind of ‘thaw’ that has so often been used to characterise the
Khrushchev years.
2.4.1 CONVICTIONS UNDER ARTICLE 58-10
The table below shows the number of individuals sentenced under article 58-10
during the Khrushchev period.
The surge of convictions in 1957 and 1958 is
particularly noticeable. The data was provided by Viktor Chebrikov, chairman of the
KGB between 1982 and 1988, in response to a request from Mikhail Gorbachev for
details on repression in the post-Stalin era.
Table 2.3 Annual sentences for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda, 1956-1964. 84
Year
Annual sentences
1956
Proportion of all political
sentences
during
the
Khrushchev period. %
384
6.7%
1957
1,964
34.3%
1958
1,416
24.7%
1959
750
13.1%
1960
162
2.8%
1961
207
3.6%
1962
323
5.6%
1963
341
6%
1964
181
3.2%
Total
5,728
100%
Source: Istochnik, 1995, No. 6, p. 153.
84
For the complete list of annual political sentences up to 1987 see appendix.
133
It is important to point out that the above figures on sentences for anti-Soviet activity
do not only include those who engaged in political dissent but also nationalist and
religious activity. For the most part though, the authorities did not clampdown on any
two of these three kinds of dissent concurrently. Anti-religious drives were begun in
1954 and again toward the end of 1958, while persecution against nationalist activity
was in decline for some time prior to the Secret Speech but rose again toward the mid1960s. Across the period as a whole approximately two-thirds to three quarters of
those jailed for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda were political dissenters. During
the campaign that followed the December Letter, however, almost all convictions
under article 58-10 were based upon political dissent.
As Burlatsky wrote in his memoir of the era: ‘Later I learned that under Khrushchev
many hundreds of people had suffered for so-called political crimes, that is, for
voicing disagreement with his policies.
Brezhnev developed this practice on a
massive scale and with even greater deceit, but it must be acknowledged that it began
under Khrushchev’. 85 In fact, the practice of imprisoning dissenters in this way not
only began under Khrushchev but was actually more prevalent during his time as First
Secretary – a fact that would probably come as a surprise for most people.
At no other time in the entire post-Secret Speech era were a comparable number of
citizens arrested and sentenced for dissenting activity. Although many times lower
than the amount sentenced for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda in the Stalin years,
the total of 1,964 sentences for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda in 1957 alone by
far outstripped that of any subsequent year. It is worth noting that in the entire period
85
Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, p. 97.
134
of 1966 to 1980 (when the Soviet dissident movement was most active) the total
number of ‘political sentences’ was 1,829. 86
However, one must exercise some
caution in making sweeping comparisons between the two periods by reference to this
measure alone, as there was a general move away from large-scale custodial
sentencing in later years (see chapter 4). Nonetheless, the records quite clearly show
that many more people were jailed for dissent under Khrushchev than Brezhnev, and
over half of those were sentenced during 1957 and 1958.
2.4.2 GROUNDS FOR ARREST AND CONVICTION
By providing only a rudimentary outline of what constituted anti-Soviet behaviour,
the ensuing campaign saw a considerable degree of unpredictability return to the
Soviet repressive apparatus. That the provincial officials charged with conducting the
clampdown were often poorly educated and trained, and eager to appear vigilant was
a cause of considerable inconsistency and one of the reasons why the December Letter
spawned a full-blown campaign, according to Aleksandr and Elena Papovyan. 87 The
result was that local procurators and KGB branches frequently erred on the side of
caution and employed article 58-10 in a wide-ranging and often wholly unsuitable
fashion. As a subsequent review of sentences during the period noted, there were
many cases where citizens were jailed for private conversations or jokes and instances
of local authorities pursuing vendettas against individuals on the basis of personal
86
The figures provided on the Brezhnev period included sentences under article 70 (the successor to
article 58 – see chapter 4) as well as article 190-1 which was introduced in 1960 as a means of
strengthening the already existing legal provisions for dealing with dissent.
87
A. Papovyan and E. Papovyan, ‘Uchastie verkhovnogo suda SSSR v vyrabotke repressivnoi politiki,
1957-1958’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds, Korni Travy, p. 86.
135
animosities or instances of entirely acceptable criticism such as letters of complaint
about poor housing conditions or low wages. 88
Most notable, however, was the sheer volume of those sentenced as a result of
apparently isolated, and often drunken, outbursts: over fifty per cent of all sentences
during the campaign. Several instances have already been cited in chapter 1 where
individuals found themselves arrested and sentenced for anti-Soviet behaviour after
drunkenly calling members of the militia ‘fascists’ or shouting slogans such as ‘long
live Eisenhower’. Numerous underground groups – such as those of Pimenov and
Krasnopevtsev – and anonymous letter writers were also arrested and jailed at this
time yet the authorities largely failed to make a distinction between this kind of
purposive, deliberate behaviour and angry drunken outbursts. Those who remained
silent were still unlikely to be embroiled in any kind of ‘trumped up’ charges, but
there was rarely any attempt made to establish whether a person who criticised the
authorities was actually opposed to the regime or not.
The citizens of Moscow and Leningrad were hit hardest by the clampdown, with
records showing 102 and 45 convictions in those cities respectively during 1957.
From a total of 1,964 sentences in 1957 only 63 were women and out of 1,416 in 1958
there were 45 women (a little over 3% of all convictions in both years) – most of
whom were jailed on the basis of underground activity rather than spontaneous and
drunken outbursts in 1956 and 1957. However, although no documentation has yet
arisen to prove the matter, this huge discrepancy between sentences against men and
88
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, ll. 30-35.
136
women may not only reflect that females were less inclined to engage in dissent but
also that the authorities were more reluctant to jail them for it.
Females who distributed leaflets and became members of underground groups were
almost always outnumbered by their male group-mates, with the one exception of a
five strong all-female group uncovered in Krasnoyarsk in 1961. This group was
particularly active for a short while in late 1961, pasting up leaflets in many locations
around the city under the name of The Krasnoyarsk Workers and attempting to hold
anti-Soviet meetings with fellow Komsomol and trade union members. 89
It also
seems that in several cases they were the wives or girlfriends of the more prominent
males within a given group and so their impetus to join possibly came from an already
existing bond.
Although the statistics held in Procurator files are incomplete, one can see that 476 of
those convicted in 1957 were classified as having achieved ‘lower’ level education
and almost 150 were recorded as having undergone some form of higher education. 90
Clearly, a sizeable majority of dissenters had only a few classes of formal education.
However, the 1959 census stated that less than two per cent of the Soviet population
had undergone higher education – indicating that the most educated people were
actually considerably over-represented among those jailed for dissent. This marks a
clear distinction from the dissident activity of the Brezhnev era in which members of
the intelligentsia famously predominated.
89
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 91724, Ll. 1-8.
Unfortunately, the KGB appears to have been less consistent at recording political prisoners’
education levels. Approximately two thirds of case files for individuals sentenced under article 58-10
give some basic data on educational achievement. The category of ‘lower educated’ contains
everything from illiterate up to 10 classes of schooling, ‘middle’ usually involves some kind of
technical qualification and ‘higher’ indicates attendance at university or some other higher education
institute.
90
137
It is also interesting to look briefly at the number of CPSU and Komsomol members
jailed for dissent around this time. For the period of 1957-1958 a total of 99 full
CPSU members and 100 Komsomol members were jailed for acts of political dissent.
When one looks at the kinds of dissent that they engaged in there was a strong trend
for Party and Komsomol members to have been involved in anonymous rather than
open activity. Most commonly among CPSU members this meant individual acts of
protest such as the writing of anonymous anti-Soviet letters and leaflets. In the
Komsomol there was a more pronounced trend toward group activity such as the
formation of underground political parties. This was presumably a further reflection
of the fact that a person’s age tended to have an impact upon what kinds of dissenting
behaviour they became involved in.
It has already been established that CPSU and Komsomol members were less likely to
be jailed as a result of dissenting activity than were ordinary members of the public,
yet it is a point worth revisiting. One can put forward two potential reasons for this
trend. The first reason would be to suggest that because these people were Party and
Komsomol members – and therefore communists – the authorities were less likely to
jump to the conclusion that they were genuine enemies of the Soviet regime. A
second explanation would be that these were people over whom the authorities had a
wider breadth of punitive measures available. For example, one could punish a
dissenting CPSU member with a Party reprimand or expulsion (with all the negative
consequences that this entailed) as well as with article 58-10.
For a non-Party
member who engaged in dissent at this time the only major sanction available was
imprisonment.
138
These two factors were not mutually exclusive yet the second was perhaps the more
important. The fact that, like CPSU and Komsomol members, students were also less
likely to be jailed than ordinary members of society supports this argument because
the authorities had the option to expel them from university rather than simply jailing
them or doing nothing. As Moshe Lewin has shown, this was a time when workers
were in short supply and, therefore, in a strong position when it came to finding
employment. As such, simply having a dissenting worker fired from his or her job
would not necessarily have been a major sanction. 91
In later years the authorities were less inclined to jail dissenters and instead came to
rely heavily on what were known as ‘prophylactic measures’ – essentially a form of
targeted intimidation intended to forestall dissenting behaviour. This showed that
once a viable deterrent that could be applied to all members of society had been
established it quickly supplanted more forceful means of response. Nonetheless,
CPSU and Komsomol members who engaged in acts of protest and criticism remained
less likely to be jailed than non-communist dissenters and those who were actually
convicted of political crimes were generally dealt with less severely than others once
in jail and seem to have fared better in appeals for release and rehabilitation. 92
One of the interesting aspects of the campaign was the way that it was applied across
the entire country. Although detailed figures are not available for the second year of
the campaign, the following table gives an indication of how matters were played out
in the individual union republics during 1957:
91
92
See Lewin, The Soviet Century, p. 172.
See Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola, p. 100.
139
Table 2.4 Distribution of sentences for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda by
union republic in 1957
Union Republic
Russia
Total sentenced in % of all sentences of Soviet
1957
in 1957
population by
union republic %
957
53.1%
56.4%
Ukraine
443
24.5%
20.5%
Belarus
65
3.3%
3.8%
Moldova
27
1.4%
1.3%
Latvia
43
2.3%
1%
Lithuania
68
3.6%
1.3%
Estonia
39
2.1%
0.6%
Georgia
25
1.3%
2.1%
Armenia
11
0.6%
0.9%
Azerbaidzhan
10
0.5
1.6%
Turkmenistan
22
1.1
0.7%
Kirgizstan
11
0.6
1.1
Uzbekistan
55
3.1
3.4%
Kazakhstan
44
2.3
4.3%
Tadzhikistan
4
0.2
1
1,796
100%
100%
Total
Source: 1958 Procurator review. GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 5. 93
93
The data on the composition of the Soviet population (in the right-hand column) is taken from the
1959 census. See Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrove SSSR, Chislennost’,
sostav i razmeshchenie naseleniya SSSR: kratkie itogi Vsesoyuznoi perepisi naseleniya 1959 goda,
Moskva: Gosstatizdat TsSU SSSR, 1961, p. 3-8.
140
As we can see from the above data, this was undoubtedly an all-Union campaign.
Broadly speaking, the volume of sentences in each union republic was roughly
proportionate with its contribution to the overall Soviet population. The fact that the
total number of sentences provided by the Procurator’s Office does not tally with data
provided by the KGB – cited in table 2.3 – is, unfortunately, reflective of the fact that
Soviet statistics can be incomplete and contradictory at times. This discrepancy may
have stemmed from the fact that some legal records were apparently lost during the
numerous administrative reshuffles of the Khrushchev era. 94 The fact that the KGB
figures were compiled three decades later would suggest that they may have
incorporated information that was unavailable at the time of the original Procurator
review and, therefore, may be the more accurate of the two. Nonetheless, the two
different totals provided by the Procuracy and KGB (1,964 and 1,796 respectively)
are sufficiently close together that some faith can be placed in their general validity in
terms of regional distribution.
2.4.3 LEGAL PROCESSES
The processes involved in prosecuting acts of dissent on a legal basis provides a
useful example of the way that the different elements of the law enforcement
apparatus functioned in tandem with one another. More often than not where acts of
dissent involved some kind of public manifestation, such as drunken outbursts against
the leadership, it was the militia that were first to respond since they were the
regime’s most numerous and most visible representatives at ground level. The case
would then usually be passed directly to the KGB, who theoretically had complete
94
See Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola.
141
jurisdiction in all matters concerning political crimes, though arrests and searches had
to be sanctioned by the Procurator of a given oblast’.
Indicative of the improved legal procedures that emerged following Stalin’s death was
the creation in 1953 of the ‘Department of Supervision of KGB Investigations’ (otdel’
po nadzoru za sledstviem v organakh gosbezopasnosti prokuratury SSSR) within the
Procurator’s office. However, although this new department theoretically had the
authority to challenge evidence provided by the security organs and to re-classify and
overturn cases where inconsistencies or lack of evidence were found to be present,
there is little evidence to suggest that it did so at this time. Subsequent years would
show that considerable division and rivalry existed between the security organs and
the legal establishment when the latter did begin to reclassify and overturn sentences
that had been passed during the campaign of 1957 and 1958.
Prior to the establishment in 1968 of the specialised Fifth Directorate under the
chairmanship of Yuri Andropov, matters relating to dissent had been under the
jurisdiction of the KGB Second Chief Directorate, that of Internal Security and
Counter-Intelligence (again demonstrating the regime’s perception of dissent as a
foreign-inspired phenomenon). 95
This seems to have meant that there was less
coordination of practice and specialised skills within the security organs for dealing
with dissenters during the early Khrushchev period in particular.
The security organs’ investigation techniques had changed much since the Stalin era.
After his own arrest in 1957 Revolt Pimenov recalled that his interrogators were
95
See C. Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Secret History of the KGB, London: Basic Books,
1999, p. 568.
142
almost unfailingly, and at times even obsequiously, polite. 96 Violence and torture had
ceased to be staples of KGB investigations yet pressure could still be applied in other
ways, such as threats to arrest suspects’ friends and loved ones. Stool pigeons were
regularly placed in prisoners’ cells while they were under interrogation and deception
in regard to co-defendants testimonies remained widespread.
What one repeatedly encounters even among classified materials is a tendency to shy
away from presenting detailed information on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the investigation
process. For example, reports sent from the KGB to the Central Committee’s General
Department tend to be studded with phrases such as ‘the KGB is utilising all its
resources’ or ‘measures are being taken’ to investigate a specific occurrence. Exactly
what the use of such oblique terminology covers up is unclear yet the reasons for it
can be easily inferred.
The condemnation of Stalin’s abuses created a situation
whereby information directly linking any individual to repressive measures would
naturally be avoided where possible. The Secret Speech had established a precedent
that could well be repeated at some stage in the future.
Unfortunately, what could potentially have been the most valuable document in
regard to the policing of dissent was destroyed on the orders of General Procurator
Roman Rudenko.
In 1958 a putative manual had been produced, entitled ‘On
Procurator Supervision in Cases of State Crimes’. The manuscript had been intended
as a general guide on how the courts and security organs ought to handle cases of antiSoviet activity, particularly useful in the provinces where improved legal practices
were less well established and mistakes in investigations and legal procedures were
96
R. Pimenov, Vospominaniya, Moskva: Informatsionno-ekspertnaya gruppa ‘Panorama’, 1996, p. 103.
143
made more frequently. However, on reviewing the completed document Rudenko
ordered that all plans for its publication be abandoned and that the existing copies (38
in total) be removed from circulation. All but one were destroyed and the final copy
was classified but has yet to come to light. 97 Since there was clearly some need for
this document, and no replacement was produced, one can only assume that Rudenko
decided that it was too incautious to commit such matters to paper.
Despite various improvements to the legal system, a Soviet courtroom was still not a
place where one could expect anything resembling a fair trial. By all accounts, judges
did not see their task as establishing guilt or innocence but in establishing the level of
guilt and reflecting this in their sentencing; a fact neatly demonstrated in the March
1964 trial of Joseph Brodsky where a sign had been hung on the entrance to the
courthouse that read ‘trial of the parasite Brodsky’. 98 At any rate, no cases have yet
come to light in which KGB evidence was dismissed in court and an individual was
judged innocent of the accusations against them.
Unfortunately, few case files contain information in regard to the duration of
individual sentences passed down upon conviction for anti-Soviet activity and
propaganda. However, it is possible to find some basic details on the subject:
97
Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola, p. 32.
See Burford Jr, R. ‘Getting the Bugs Out of Socialist Legality: The Case of Joseph Brodsky’, The
American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 1994, pp. 465-501.
98
144
Table 2.5 Length of sentences under article 58-10 in the period 1956-57 99
Year
1956
1957
Up to 5 Years
6-10 Years
Over 10 Years
Total
95
131
5
231
(41.1%)
(56.7%)
(2.2%)
(100%)
930
829
29
1,788
(52%)
(46.4%)
(1.6%)
(100%)
Source: 1958 Procurator review. GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 7
From the above evidence, contained in a 1958 Procurator review of anti-Soviet
activity, it appears that the average length of sentence under article 58-10 was
approximately five years. Perhaps most striking is the fact that so few were sentenced
to periods of ten years or more and, though the above table does not show this, none
were executed as a result of dissenting behaviour. Although the potential price to be
paid for dissenting behaviour remained high, it was far lower than during the Stalin
years.
The fact that this campaign progressed throughout 1957 without any kind of
interruption raises two interesting points.
Firstly, it suggests that this was not
something that had simply been forced upon Khrushchev by the hard-line Stalinists in
the leadership, since the most senior among them were removed after the anti-Party
affair in June 1957, yet the campaign continued unabated for another year afterward.
This may offer support for Carl Linden’s supposition that Khrushchev’s victory over
99
The document in question gives no indication as to why the percentage figures do not add up to one
hundred. Again, this is testament to the occasional weakness of Soviet statistical data.
145
the anti-Party group had been achieved after colleagues in the leadership had made
him agree to shelve, or at least to slow down, the process of deStalinisation. 100
It is also notable that all of this was ongoing before, during and after the World Youth
Festival, which brought tens of thousands of visitors to Moscow from around the
world. It made good sense for the authorities to remove vocal discontents from the
streets, leaving visitors with the impression that all was well inside the Soviet Union –
a practice that was repeated during the 1980 Olympics. In fact, the Youth Festival
appears to have been something of a propaganda victory for the Soviet regime and
helped to propagate its image as a progressive state, showing that the campaign
proceeded largely unnoticed by those not directly affected.
The lack of wide-scale press coverage accompanying the crackdown on dissent
suggests that the campaign cannot have been intended to intimidate potentially
rebellious elements into silence. It was, therefore, most likely intended as a shortterm measure: a palliative against the existing unstable environment that the
Hungarian rising had provoked. This showed the extent to which the relationship
between the Soviet regime and society had already come to involve the outside world
to an ever increasing extent since Stalin’s death and also the extent to which the
regime still, in the first instance, looked to use repression as a sticking plaster to cover
up its problems rather than seeking a longer term solution.
Although generally not its default approach to the matter, the Khrushchev regime
clearly was willing to revert to arrests and sentences on a fairly large scale when it
100
C. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990, p. 47.
146
was deemed necessary. This increased level of repressive activity did not just reflect
that the authorities were more attentive to dissent during 1957 and 1958 but also that
there had been a real growth in the number of individuals who were either publicly
attacking the regime or undertaking clandestine political activity according to
evidence presented by the KGB and Procurator’s office. 101
That there has been
practically no mention of this campaign against dissent in Western historiography on
the Khrushchev era is perhaps one of the reasons why many commentators have
overstated the liberality of that time.
2.5 WINDING DOWN THE CAMPAIGN
The Soviet regime’s struggle with dissenters was, of course, to carry on virtually
without pause up to the eventual collapse of the USSR and later years featured two
more particularly important clampdowns on dissenters – one in the early 1970s and
another toward the end of that decade. 102 The campaign that had been initiated by the
December letter lasted until around the middle of 1958. By that time over 3,000
individuals had been jailed for anti-Soviet activity since the letter had been circulated.
This was a total far lower than for any eighteen month period under Stalin yet also
much higher than any comparable period of time under Brezhnev.
By the middle of 1958, the main stimulus for the crackdown on dissent – the threat of
instability prompted by events in Hungary – had all but evaporated. The extent to
which the application of article 58-10 had been dependent upon the prevailing
101
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 4.
The first of these two Brezhnev era clampdowns was primarily aimed at destroying the samizdat
journal The Chronicle of Current Events. It proved to be a failure in the long-term but did prevent The
Chronicle from appearing for well over a year. The second campaign was most notable for the fact that
leading members of the Moscow Helsinki Group were arrested and subsequently jailed, including Yuri
Orlov, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Anatoly Shcharansky.
102
147
domestic and international programme was shown by the Soviet legal experts
Kurlasnky and Mikhailov.
They explained that ‘in the period of the counter-
revolutionary revolt in Hungary, persons hostilely inclined toward the socialist order
expressed approval of the revolt, who lauded the acts of the rebels and called for
restoration of capitalist ways in the USSR were properly held responsible under
article 58-10’ yet criticism of other areas of Party policy did not require such a harsh
response. 103 In other words, while the rising in Hungary was considered a potential
source of domestic instability the authorities would take a hard line against dissenters
who spoke on this theme. At other times, when the domestic situation was more
stable, such comments could go without a severe response.
Although the causes of the campaign may have disappeared, it still required some
kind of tangible catalyst for it to be decisively drawn to a close. Perhaps the most
interesting aspect of the way that the campaign was ended is the fact that the telling
pressure was applied neither from outside of the regime nor from within the top
political leadership. Instead what can quite clearly be seen is that it was the entreaties
and advice of the Soviet legal establishment, in the form of the Procurator’s office and
the Supreme Court in particular, that played a leading role in winding down the wave
of arrests and sentences.
103
V. Kurlanskii and M. Mikhailov eds, Osobo opasnye gosudarstvennye prestupleniya, Moskva:
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1963, p. 126.
148
2.5.1 THE PROCURATOR REVIEW
The Supreme Court had in fact been expressing reservations about the legality of the
campaign for some months by the summer of 1958. According to Aleksandr and
Elena Papovyan, pressure had already started to build for the campaign to be ended in
1957 but, they suggested, inertia within the repressive mechanisms and KGB
resistance had prevented any softening of policy. 104 Perhaps the Party leadership had
simply not been ready to listen to voices urging caution at that time. One particular
document in which doubts were raised in respect of several specific cases and calls
were made for sentences to be reviewed was the report entitled ‘Information on the
results of legal practice in cases of counter-revolutionary crimes’. 105 Compiled in
early 1958, and drawing upon numerous cases from 1956 and early 1957, the report
essentially argued that too many of those who were being sentenced under article 5810 should not have been branded ‘anti-Soviet’ but dealt with in some more
appropriate manner.
In May 1958 this report was forwarded to the CPSU Central Committee. The timing
of its submission to the Central Committee suggests that the Supreme Court spravka
(report) was the direct catalyst for a review of sentencing policy in cases of counterrevolutionary crimes that was subsequently carried out during May and June of 1958.
The ultimate impact of this report leads one to conclude that it had been sanctioned by
the very highest political authorities and that, in all likelihood, its recommendations
may well also have been pre-ordained.
104
Papovyan and Papovyan, ‘Uchastie verkhovnogo suda SSSR’ in Eremina and Zhemkova eds, Korni
Travy, p. 68.
105
GARF, f. 9474, op. 16c, e.kh. 648, ll. 1-73.
149
The review began by presenting detailed figures on the numbers and social
composition of those who had been sentenced during the campaign. It went on to cite
numerous individual cases of citizens arrested and jailed for anti-Soviet agitation and
propaganda since Stalin’s death, and particularly since the December letter. It pointed
to the uprising in Hungary and the unmasking of Stalin as the two main catalysts for
raised levels of dissenting activity and stated that the increased number of convictions
showed that the KGB and Procuracy had been effective and vigilant in following the
new guidelines set out in December 1956. 106
However, after the ‘sugar coating’ that was traditional at the beginning of such
reports, it then painted a more complete picture. In its concluding remarks the review
stated ‘the (security) organs are essentially conducting the struggle well but are
sometimes apprehending people who are not truly anti-Soviet’, before proceeding to
assert that ‘…complaints about individual shortages or problems are not anti-Soviet.
This can entail gossip about leaders, jokes of a political character, complaints about
agriculture – all of which can be without counter-revolutionary meaning’. 107 It then
referred back to the statement in the December letter that had urged caution in
sentencing as anti-Soviet those who were simply mistaken in their views, naïve or
materially unhappy. The closing lines of the review proved to be the most significant
of all: ‘Mistakes are being made in cases of counter-revolutionary crimes. The courts
require a clarification from the Plenum of the Supreme Court as regards what does
and does not constitute anti-Soviet behaviour’. 108
106
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 17.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 42.
108
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 43.
107
150
2.5.2 THE SUPREME COURT
The Supreme Court resolution duly arrived on 13 June 1958. Its overall message can
be summed up by the following line: ‘for an act to be considered anti-Soviet it has to
be consciously aimed at harming the Soviet state’. It then went on to recommend that
those who drunkenly curse the authorities or act primarily out of material discontent
should not necessarily (italics added) be charged under article 58-10 and that courts
and investigators should look at individuals’ biographies, including their work and
war record, social status and age, in order to help distinguish between anti-Soviet
activity and a ‘faulty attitude toward certain events or policies’. 109 At the end of 1958
these recommendations were included in a new set of basic legal principles for
dealing with what were now termed ‘crimes against the state’ rather than ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ (see chapter 4).
This was a crucial step in the creation of a more sophisticated and effective corpus of
policy against dissent. It marked the point where the regime’s ‘fire fighting’ approach
to policing dissent began to be replaced with a more sophisticated and less outwardly
repressive approach. It showed that by the end of the 1950s the authorities themselves
had implicitly begun to distinguish between conscious acts of dissent such as those
often carried out by members of the intelligentsia and the spontaneous expressions of
frustration and anger that tended to feature more among workers, and subsequently to
tailor their response accordingly. Roughly speaking, the regime had come to see that
even when reflected in political language, material dissatisfaction was inherently less
dangerous than political dissatisfaction provided that it was kept at manageable levels.
109
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 64.
151
There was some considerable wisdom in making this distinction between the kinds of
spontaneous worker dissent and the more persistent and pre-planned dissent that
reflected some degree of genuine discontent at the contemporary political situation.
However, it is also true that much of the pre-planned and more deeply politicised
dissenting behaviour that took place around this time was still not ‘consciously aimed
at harming the Soviet state’ or genuinely opposed to the regime either – something
that the authorities completely overlooked.
What this new distinction signalled was that the political authorities were beginning to
gain a more nuanced understanding of dissent. As chapter 4 of the thesis shows, this
was to prove an important and effective shift in the direction of policy against dissent.
Nonetheless, to suggest that this represented proof of the Soviet regime embracing the
rule of law would be a step too far. More effort was put into creating a façade of
legality yet, in actual fact, the regime continued to enjoy a virtually free hand in the
way that it responded to its critics. As soon as the authorities perceived a threat to
domestic stability, all other considerations – such as legal processes and international
public opinion – could still be brushed aside.
A wider point arising from the way that the campaign was brought to a close is that of
the role played by the Soviet legal establishment. This was not the first or last time
that the Supreme Court and Procurator’s office were able to have a restraining effect
on Party policy. As Harold Berman pointed out in regard of the parasitism laws that
Khrushchev attempted to force through, Soviet jurists were able to exert a degree of
pressure on the leadership preventing a return to the arbitrariness and mass illegality
of Stalinism – something that was also the case here in regard to the persecution of
152
dissenters. 110
Yoram Gorlizki has shown that justice officials also resisted
Khrushchev’s attempts to give Comrades’ Courts the power to exile citizens for up to
five years and Moshe Lewin has stated that Soviet jurists took the lead in pushing for
greater liberalisation of criminal justice during the 1970s. 111 This is not to suggest
that one should consider the legal establishment to have been somehow ‘liberal’ but
instead one should see it as an attempt to become more ‘professional’ and a little more
independent of the political authorities. This was a development that also seems to
have been taking place among scientists at the time (see chapter 3).
The reality is that the legal establishment was able to have a restraining influence such
as this only when the leadership allowed them to do so, meaning that any gains in this
area could always be reversed at a stroke. In support of this argument Leonard
Schapiro cited a remark that was apparently made by a Soviet Deputy Procurator
General to a visiting American professor of law: ‘…if it becomes necessary we will
restore the old methods. But I think it will not be necessary’. 112 Naturally one must
place a question mark over the validity of such anecdotal evidence, especially as it
seems doubtful that a senior member of the Soviet legal establishment would have
spoken so candidly with a visiting American. Ultimately though, whether these words
were actually uttered by the Deputy Procurator or not, this was the position that had
been adopted.
110
See H. Berman, ‘The Struggle of Soviet Jurists’, Slavic Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, June 1963, pp. 314320.
111
See Y. Gorlizki, ‘Delegalization in Russia: Soviet Comrades’ Courts in Retrospect’, American
Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. 46, No. 3, Summer 1998, pp. 403-425 and Lewin, The Soviet
Century, p. 171.
112
Schapiro, The Communist Party, p. 611.
153
2.6 CONCLUSIONS
This was clearly a period in which the regime struggled to find the most effective way
of getting to grips with dissent: a fact that is reflected in the characteristic policy
zigzags. Rather than implementing a pre-planned series of measures to forestall
protest and criticism, the regime was often occupied with reacting to events that had
already happened. This generally entailed reliance upon more traditional Stalin-era
responses such as sentencing critics to labour camps and prisons. Although members
of the leadership were rarely involved in responding to individual acts of dissent, it
was the Central Committee Presidium that set the overall tone for the way that society
was policed.
The assumptions and attitudes on which policy against dissent was based were rarely
entirely unrealistic yet they were frequently exaggerated or unsophisticated. What
this meant was that the authorities’ perception of the danger presented by dissenting
activity was occasionally overestimated and thus led to an unnecessarily severe
response to acts that actually belied little or no genuine oppositional sentiment or
intent. In turn this served to increase the alienation of some dissenters and in the long
term force them from a mildly critical position to one approaching outright
condemnation of the regime.
Even though the regime could not be described as pursuing a coherent and
sophisticated plan, their attempts to combat dissenting behaviour were not without
success. Open dissent within the Party and Komsomol was quickly reined in within
less than a year after the Secret Speech. The student body too seems to have become
154
a far less notable source of criticism and protest once the regime began to take
measures to neutralise ‘unhealthy elements’ in its midst. There were also failures,
however. Although CPSU and Komsomol members had largely ceased to engage in
public criticism, and remained outwardly obedient for decades after, they did continue
to participate in underground groups and sent anonymous letters. Eliminating public
acts of dissent did not equate to eliminating all dissent and in fact the first half of the
1960s saw underground activity flourish.
The general characterisation of the Khrushchev period as one of relative liberality is
called into question by the evidence presented in this chapter. The fact that well over
a thousand people were jailed for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda on the basis of
isolated drunken clashes with the militia or for telling jokes about political figures
clearly demonstrates that a strong vein of authoritarianism remained.
The key
difference with the Stalin era was not that the scope of acceptable criticism had been
expanded significantly but that the regime had reduced the severity of what it
considered to be an appropriate response to acts of criticism and protest.
In regard to the way that dissent was policed in later years, it was the winding down
of the 1957-1958 campaign that was most significant. The insistence that acts of
protest and criticism had to show genuine intent to undermine or weaken the Soviet
regime for them to be regarded as ‘anti-Soviet’ became a keystone of the authorities’
responses to critics. Many of the lessons that were learned, however, showed how not
to react to dissent. Reliance upon local Party organisations to respond to critical
remarks without providing detailed guidelines prompted inconsistency. Later years
witnessed a degree of centralisation in this sphere as a more methodical and
155
considered approach was employed. By the end of the 1950s, the Soviet regime
began to punish less but to punish better.
The relationship between the state and society was undergoing major changes around
this time as the transition away from unrestrained Stalinism continued. This was a
period when the authorities viewed society with more than a little trepidation, fearing
that the stability of the regime was not entirely certain – perhaps rightly so. One of
the key aspects of the Khrushchev era as a whole in regard to the relationship between
state and society was the way that the regime became more sensitive to public moods.
Although more noticeable in the later part of the Khrushchev era, this could already
be seen in the authorities’ panicked response to the Hungarian rising, for example.
156
CHAPTER 3
PROTEST AND DISSENT: 1959-1964
In many ways the first half of the 1960s were not fundamentally different to the late
1950s in regard to dissenting behaviour; people still made anti-Soviet leaflets, formed
underground groups and generally criticised the regime’s failings.
As a social
phenomenon in which participants were almost entirely isolated from each other, one
would not expect dissenting behaviour to evolve quickly or evenly across years,
regions or classes. However, when one takes a more panoramic view of the entire
period, there were also some important developments that can be observed during the
second half of Khrushchev’s rule.
While the years following Stalin’s death could be characterised as a time of great
political and social oscillation, for the country at large life had begun to settle down a
little by the end of the 1950s and living standards continued to improve. With a rising
standard of living and higher levels of education came greater aspirations and
increased demands were made upon the regime. There were no political upheavals
comparable to the XX CPSU Congress and no foreign activity as divisive as the
Hungarian invasion yet, in a number of ways, the problem of dissent became even
more acute for a time before the authorities were able to again reduce acts of protest
and criticism to a minimum.
With dissenting behaviour taking on a more stable form around the turn of the decade,
the present chapter (and that which follows) has a slightly more thematic focus. It
addresses the most important themes and forms of protest and criticism among
157
workers and the intelligentsia, such as opposition to Khrushchev, mass disorders and
underground activity, as separate phenomena. Approaching the subject in this way,
one can see that although there was still relatively little appetite for revolution,
popular enthusiasm and respect for the regime and, to an extent also for MarxismLeninism, were in decline. Social stability was becoming dependant upon material
satisfaction and the formative stages of the Brezhnev era human rights movement
were taking place during Khrushchev’s last years in power.
The kind of misjudged criticism of the authorities that had been a feature of the postSecret Speech period was eradicated as the new boundaries of acceptable and
unacceptable comment had been firmly established by the end of the 1950s. It was
not only the uncertainty of the post-Secret Speech period that had faded by the turn of
the decade but also much of the atmosphere of utopianism that it had engendered.
Many dissenters and would-be dissenters had already been jailed, removed from the
Party and Komsomol or otherwise intimidated into silence. Even before the end of the
1950s it had become entirely evident that there was still practically no legitimate
outlet for loyal political criticism. Many acquiesced to this new reality but some grew
ever more alienated from the regime because of it. As such, the dissent that did
surface increasingly took on a much sharper and more quasi-subversive tone while
manifestations of worker protest often also became more volatile.
Marxism-Leninism continued to be the dominant political philosophy among most
dissenters but was a waning force throughout the 1960s and even a growing number
of those who still held out hope for a more liberal form of socialism no longer
believed it could happen under the existing regime. Khrushchev in particular became
158
a ‘lightning rod’ for people’s dissatisfaction as the legitimacy of the incumbent Soviet
leadership and support for its domestic activity seems to have begun a notable decline
in the eyes of the people. 113
Material concerns remained the overwhelming catalyst for acts of protest among
workers in particular. Although still cloaked in Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, it was
apparent that the workers were essentially demanding an acceptable standard of living
and were, on occasion, prepared to fight to achieve it. Importantly, they were, to a
considerable extent, successful in forcing the authorities to address their most pressing
concerns. During the first half of the 1960s worker dissent flared violently before
almost entirely tailing off by the middle of the decade. The result was that the
working class went on to remain outwardly passive until that same combination of
political turbulence, general atmosphere of renewal and widespread material
shortcomings again made themselves felt under Gorbachev years later. 114
Among dissenters from the intelligentsia, spiritual matters (in the non-religious sense)
dominated over material concerns while ideological issues generally became less
important. Particularly in Moscow, critics of the authorities began to enter into each
other’s orbit and to find common ground, establishing rudimentary networks of likeminded individuals. Underground activity went into decline and the tendency toward
open and more legalistic forms of criticism began to develop, displaying a number of
very clear indicators of the subsequent human rights movement of the Brezhnev years.
113
See for example V. Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in
Post-Stalin Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 and E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy
1945-1964, Moskva: Izdatel’skii tsentr ‘Rossiya molodaya’, 1993.
114
There was, however, a steady growth in tangential indicators of worker dissatisfaction, such as
labour indiscipline and drunkenness, that arguably represented a form of ‘silent resistance’. See for
example P. Sorlin, The Soviet People and Their Society: From 1917 to the Present, London: Pall Mall
Press, 1968.
159
Although still slanted heavily in favour of the latter, the relationship between society
and the regime became slightly less one-sided than it had been in previous years. The
disturbances of summer 1962, in particular, demonstrated to the authorities that
popular dissatisfaction could have potentially cataclysmic results and had to be
prevented as far as possible. One can also see the extent to which the outside world
was becoming a more important actor in the relationship between society and the
regime as ever-greater breaches were made in the authorities’ monopoly on the
information that reached Soviet citizens, seemingly causing cynicism and mistrust to
grow exponentially.
3.1 OPPOSITION TO KHRUSHCHEV
Considering the general tone of present-day appraisals of Khrushchev, one might
reasonably have expected him not to feature among the most frequent targets of
dissenters’ criticism. Historians in the West have generally viewed Khrushchev quite
positively as an individual and he was, after all, the man who had exposed Stalin’s
crimes, fostered a degree of cultural liberalisation and expended considerable effort
on raising living standards.
On the contrary, Khrushchev was singled out for a great deal of criticism and personal
abuse from dissenters. Like other Soviet leaders he was the subject of mocking
nicknames, caricatures and anekdoty yet there was also an aspect to these attacks that
was much more pointed but has rarely been raised in studies of the period. This was
not a phenomenon that was entirely novel to the early 1960s but it was one that
appears to have grown noticeably in both volume and intensity since the late 1950s.
160
Looking back three and a half decades after Khrushchev’s ouster, Ludmilla
Alexeyeva was able to state that ‘in his uneven and boorish way, Khrushchev was one
of the greatest leaders Russia ever had’. However, Alexeyeva also conceded that this
degree of admiration for Khrushchev had not developed until some time after he had
been deposed in 1964. 115 As Stephen Bittner has argued: ‘from the vantage point of
October 1964…the thaw seemed like a long sequence of missed opportunities and
squelched reforms.
From the vantage point of 1968 and later, the thaw was a
“magical era that ended as quickly as it has begun”’. 116 Hindsight has since done
much to exonerate Khrushchev from some of the criticism and abuse that was directed
his way, yet the fact that a multitude of vitriolic attacks took place at the time remains
significant.
3.1.1 EARLY ATTACKS ON KHRUSHCHEV
A strain of anti-Khrushchev sentiment already existed in the second half of the 1950s;
something that can be seen in numerous case files of individuals convicted for antiSoviet agitation and propaganda around that time. One example could be seen in the
case of N.P. Ipatov of Kirovskaya oblast’ who was jailed after publicly declaring in
February 1957 that ‘Khrushchev and Bulganin drink the people’s blood’. 117 Another
case that had proceeded through the courts a month previously saw M.K. Yusubov, a
CPSU member from Azerbaidzhan, sentenced after sending anonymous letters to
115
L. Alexeyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era,
London: Little, Brown and Company, 1990, p. 105.
116
S. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory on Moscow’s Arbat,
London: Cornell University Press, 2008, p. 7. The quote cited by Bittner is taken from M. Gessen,
Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism, London: 1997, p. 12.
117
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 81365, l. 1.
161
Pravda in which he accused Khrushchev of ‘leading the country toward disaster’. 118
The kind of hyperbolic language and lack of constructive comment involved reflect
that this was a theme more prevalent among workers in the first half of the era. This
is perhaps indicative of the fact that a degree of co-operation and even mutual reliance
still existed between Khrushchev and the intelligentsia during the second half of the
1950s. 119
Predictably, at this early stage one of the prominent trends among those who attacked
Khrushchev specifically was opposition to the exposure of Stalin’s crimes – a theme
that soon became apparent in the above-cited case of Yusubov, who had also declared
that the Secret Speech had been a disaster. However, it was by no means only
Stalinists who attacked Khrushchev in this way. Swingeing troop cuts in the Red
Army, restrictions on peasants’ private plots and unpopular shake-ups of the
bureaucracy and education system are just a few examples of ways in which different
strata of society would have understandably felt great animosity toward Khrushchev.
3.1.2 ‘BRINGING DISGRACE UPON THE COUNTRY’
One case that shows how this trend was manifested among workers can be seen in a
series of leaflets that were distributed around Moscow by Yuri Grimm and Abdulbai
Khasyanov in November 1963. The pair produced 500 copies of three different
leaflets and distributed them around Kievskii Vokzal and Bauman, Kuibyshev and
118
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 80118, ll. 1-5.
Numerous scholars have suggested that Khrushchev saw the intelligentsia as a key ally in the
struggle with his conservative rivals and that the intelligentsia in turn saw that only Khrushchev offered
the possibility of any degree of liberalisation. See, for example, Zezina, M. Sovetskaya
khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya i vlast’ v 1950e-60e gody, Moskva: Dialog MGU, 2000 and V.
Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990.
119
162
Pervomaiskii raiony of the capital. The first leaflet stated, among other things, that
‘You are nothing to Nikita, just as you were nothing to Stalin’ and asked ‘is it not
time for Khrushchev to claim his pension before he converts to a god?’ 120 The second
leaflet included statements such as ‘Are you a patriot for your homeland? If yes then
you cannot calmly relate to the disaster that our leaders are taking us to’ and ‘for
almost half a century of this regime we have strained with titanic labour and yet we
still live worse than other peoples’.121 The third and final leaflet is reproduced in its
entirety below:
Comrades!
In the name of a happy life for the Soviet people,
in the name of a bright future for our children,
in the name of saving our country from the disgrace
that the windbag Khrushchev has brought us to,
demand that the Supreme Soviet quickly removes him
from all of his positions, together with all his toadies
and names them enemies of the people.
Wake up comrades!
Don’t wait for a change, make it happen! 122
It is eminently clear that in this instance, and in many others like it, it was Khrushchev
and the ruling clique rather than the overall Soviet regime that drew people’s anger.
The closing remark inciting readers to action is indicative of the growing militancy
that featured among leaflets of the time, while the belief that the Supreme Soviet
would or could remove Khrushchev and his associates from power displays a political
naivety typical of worker dissent. The word ‘windbag’ (boltun), like ‘maize nut’
(kukharuznik) and ‘joker’ (paren’), was among the most common insults directed at
Khrushchev. The demand that Khrushchev be declared an ‘enemy of the people’
120
GARF, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, l. 22.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, l. 23.
122
GARF, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, l. 24.
121
163
(vrag naroda), on the other hand, does not seem to have been a staple of dissenters’
attacks.
One of the more notable remarks of the accompanying investigation protocol was that
‘Grimm had a long-standing and unhealthy interest in the broadcasts of Voice of
America and the BBC as well as in capitalist films and literature which had caused
him to relate negatively to Soviet activity’.123 However, this presents something of an
inconsistency since neither the BBC nor Voice of America were among the stations
that tended to attack Khrushchev personally or attempted to incite Soviet citizens to
engage in acts of protest. 124 Whether the statement was true or simply something that
Grimm had conceded in order to appease his investigators remains unclear, though it
seems likely that the security organs would have pursued this avenue of questioning.
It again demonstrates the extent to which the regime sought to tie acts of dissent with
foreign powers.
The notion that Khrushchev was somehow bringing disgrace upon the country or
leading it to disaster is one that repeatedly cropped up in such attacks. It seems that
for many people low living standards in general and particularly agricultural failures
lay at the heart of this apparent disgrace. For example, leaflets scattered on a bus in
Odessa oblast’ during September 1963 simply read: ‘Increased prices and lowered
wages.
Agriculture is collapsing.
This is Khrushchev’s work!’ 125
Similarly,
Vladimir Bukovsky recalled spending summers labouring on a collective farm in his
youth and being woken daily by the sound of peasant women outside swearing,
123
GARF, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, l. 3.
According to Vladimir Petrov, both the BBC and Voice of America had ‘ruled out’ the use of antiSoviet propaganda in their broadcasts during the 1950s. See Petrov, V. ‘Radio Liberation’, Russian
Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1958, pp. 104-114.
125
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 96255, ll. 1-7.
124
164
cursing and singing vulgar songs about Khrushchev while they worked. 126
Khrushchev’s (largely unsuccessful) meddling in agricultural matters and the decision
to buy grain from abroad for the first time in 1963, as well as restrictions that were
imposed on peasants’ private plots, left him unpopular and lacking credibility among
the peasantry in particular, despite a number of major improvements that his rule had
brought for them. 127
In regard to the peasantry, Khrushchev was not alone in being the target of their
animosity. Sheila Fitzpatrick, for example, has stated that the peasants had also hated
Stalin. 128 Whether they engaged in open abuse and criticism of him to the same
degree seems doubtful, however. It is entirely logical to suggest that the generally
lower levels of fear that existed within society under Khrushchev would have been an
important factor in such relatively public displays of animosity. It is important at this
stage to flag up the point that evidence of peasant involvement in anti-Soviet activity
at any point whatsoever is hard to come by in the files of the Procurator and KGB yet
that may well say more about the relatively low level of policing that existed within
village communities than about their attitudes toward the regime.
It is worth highlighting the value of Bukovsky’s anecdotal evidence at this point. In
the same way that Yuri Orlov’s recollections helped to provide a much stronger
picture of events at the Thermo-Technical Institute in 1956, so Bukovsky has
provided information that most likely exists in no archives, memoirs or secondary
accounts. It helps to give some insight into the scale of opposition to Khrushchev
126
Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Cambridge, March 2007.
Improvements that were specific to the peasantry included raising procurement prices for meat and
grain and ending the practice of withholding internal passports from peasants.
128
See S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After
Collectivization, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 289-296.
127
165
around the country and also into the world of political attitudes among the Soviet
peasantry – both of which are areas on which available information is particularly
scarce.
Khrushchev’s frequent and occasionally lengthy trips abroad with a huge retinue and
the holding of vast state banquets for visiting dignitaries aroused considerable anger
among the working class in particular. An anonymous letter left in a Kaliningrad
ballot box spoke of ‘communist millionaires’, stating that ‘They are stealing money,
living in luxurious palaces and they see workers as beasts’. 129 This reflected the fact
that people were angry not just at the general contrast in living standards between the
USSR and the West but also between the political elites and ordinary citizens and was
indicative of the way that people were becoming more cynical and losing respect for
the authorities.
This same pattern of cynicism and declining respect can also be seen in regard to
Khrushchev’s boasting about rising living standards, of catching up with the West and
predicting that communism would be ‘just about built’ by the year 1980. Alexeyeva
cited a popular joke on this theme: ‘Is it true that Comrade Khrushchev’s health is
declining? Yes. He is suffering from a hernia caused by lifting the level of agricultural
production, hyperventilation caused by trying to catch up with America, and verbal
diarrhoea caused by God knows what’. 130 In many cases this cynicism took a more
pointed form. One response to the 1962 price rises that has been cited by Samuel
Baron seems to have been reflective of the growing resentment: ‘If only we’d keep
129
130
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 80462, l. 33.
Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, p. 104.
166
quiet about already overtaking America. It’s disgusting to hear our loudspeaker
(going on) every day about we, we, we. All this endless boasting’. 131
3.1.3 THE KHRUSHCHEV CULT
Among other themes that saw Khrushchev provoke a sense of consternation among
some of the population was that of a burgeoning ‘Khrushchev cult’: something that
has already been touched upon in Grimm and Khasyanov’s first leaflet that asked
‘isn’t it time for Khrushchev to claim his pension before he converts to a god?’ 132
What has since become the most famous attack on this apparently developing cult
took place on 7 September 1961 when Petr Grigorenko (at that time a general in the
Red Army but later to become one of the most celebrated figures in the dissident
movement) addressed Moscow’s Lenin District Party conference.133 He talked of the
need to struggle against careerism, bureaucracy, servility, and privilege within the
Party but his main point lay in the question ‘Is everything being done to prevent the
repetition of a personality cult while the personality itself is perhaps arising?’: a clear
attack on Khrushchev himself. 134 This was subsequently followed by an open letter to
Moscow voters in which Grigorenko attacked the ‘unreasonable and often harmful
activities of Khrushchev and his team’. 135
131
S. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962: Stanford, Stanford University
Press, 2001, p. 10.
132
GARF, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, l. 19.
133
In later years Grigorenko chose to revert to using the more Ukrainian-sounding ‘Petro’ instead of
‘Petr’. He is, however, referred to throughout the present work as Petr on the basis that this was the
spelling he used at the time.
134
P. Grigorenko, Memoirs, New York: W.W. Norton, 1982, p. 240.
135
H. Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons, London: W.W. Norton, 1979, p. 18.
167
One of the problems that this burgeoning cult exacerbated was that of declining faith
in the authorities’ pronouncements. Elena Zubkova has argued that when Khrushchev
renewed his attack on Stalin at the XXII CPSU Congress – this time more bitterly
than at the XX Congress and without official secrecy – it was largely greeted with
cynicism because he was widely perceived to be building his own cult at that very
time. 136
It is true that responses to the XXII Congress were muted in terms of
dissenting behaviour yet this was not just caused by cynicism. After the initial attack
on Stalin one probably could not expect the same subject to have made such a
profound impact a second time, and neither was the uncertainty of the post XX
Congress period replicated in October 1961. It will also be shown in chapter 4 that
this time the authorities had taken steps to deal with potential outbursts of open
dissent inside the Party arising from the renewed attack on Stalin and were able to
quickly snuff them out.
Among workers and peasants in particular, where dissent often resembled something
akin to a primal lashing out at authority, it seems to have been that in some cases
Khrushchev became the focus of dissatisfaction on account of his being the regime’s
figurehead and therefore the most prominent target. Although he had proved to be a
skilful political intriguer during the struggle to succeed Stalin, Khrushchev was not
always adept at presenting a favourable image of himself to the public.
Khrushchev not only failed to distance himself from unpopular or failing policies but
allowed his name to be inextricably linked to them. Where Stalin’s March 1930
Pravda article Dizzy with Success had seen him attempting to deflect the blame for
136
Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, p. 175.
168
‘excesses’ that had occurred during the collectivisation process – laying it at the door
of local officials instead of national elites – Khrushchev demonstrated no comparable
grasp of political strategy. 137 The price rises of June 1962 were a prime case in point;
Khrushchev had been advised to distance himself from the measure yet declined to do
so and even tied his own name to the initiative more closely. 138 Consequently, many
of the manifestations of discontent that followed had a pronounced anti-Khrushchev
tone. This included instances of his portraits being vandalised, demonstrators using
slogans threatening to make sausages or pies out of him and even an instance of one
female protester at Novocherkassk being beaten by an angry mob solely on the basis
that her surname happened to be Khrushcheva. 139
It is demonstrative of the bind that Khrushchev was confronted with that his decision
to purchase grain abroad was repeatedly cited in attacks on him as a great disgrace
and embarrassment for the Soviet state. It was clearly a blow to national pride yet in
previous times bad harvests had meant widespread hunger and even starvation; a
cycle that Khrushchev broke, yet for which he was pilloried. 140 Evidently, it was the
wound that was inflicted on Soviet national pride that had the greatest impact in the
short term but those looking back on events with a little more objectivity would
struggle to argue that Khrushchev had done the wrong thing. This is not necessarily a
reflection of moral values in the present or in the West being different from those of
the Khrushchev era USSR, but one whereby an ability to view such an undertaking in
137
Pravda, 2 March 1963.
R. Medvedev and Zh. Medvedev, Nikita Khrushchev: Otets ili otchim sovetskoi ‘ottepeli’, Moskva:
Yauza, 2006.
139
See Baron, Bloody Saturday, p. 29. The reference to making pies out of Khrushchev can be traced
back to Novocherkassk workers’ complaints that they could no longer afford to buy meat and were told
by the factory director that they should make pies with liver instead.
140
The Soviet Union had experienced major famines in which a huge number of people starved to
death in 1921-1922, 1932-1933 and 1947.
138
169
a wider perspective, and with more information, than that available at the time
facilitates a different conclusion.
The way that people related to Khrushchev as the Soviet leader raises two vital points
in regard to the way that the relationship between the state and society had changed
following the exposure of Stalin’s crimes. Undoubtedly no single figure could again
arouse the same degree of public adulation that Stalin had – even though displays of
his popularity were to a large extent stage managed, there is little doubt that he also
commanded a degree of genuine veneration in much of the Party and society at large.
However, the lack of reverence for Khrushchev was not only a result of cynicism
fostered by the Secret Speech but also because of other issues such as rising education
levels and the growing flow of critical information coming from the West. More
importantly, the problem was not simply that of a lack of veneration for Khrushchev
but in some cases one of seemingly genuine detestation. After Stalin it may have been
impossible for a leader to be so admired again but this did not necessarily mean that
he would be despised by so many people either.
3.1.4 KHRUSHCHEV’S CHARACTER
One of the reasons that Khrushchev was subjected to so much criticism was that he
was deemed in some quarters, particularly among educated citizens, to be an
embarrassment as a statesman. In a society that was becoming increasingly well
educated there was considerable resentment at being represented by a leader capable
of such boorish and impulsive behaviour. Eduard Kuznetsov, for example, recalled
how he had felt certain that Khrushchev’s reckless behaviour would provoke a Third
170
World War even before the Cuban Missile Crisis brought such a possibility perilously
close to reality. 141
Yakov Rizoi, a CPSU member of 20 years, was jailed in 1962 after sending a series of
anonymous letters to political figures, including one which stated that ‘we have to
make the government turn and face the people.
Mistakes in its policies will
undoubtedly lead us to war’. 142 Kuznetsov and Rizoi did not expand upon their
reasons for believing this to be the case yet one could confidently point to issues such
as the increasingly hostile Sino-Soviet split, the unsettled status of the Berlin question
and Khrushchev’s occasionally bullying behaviour toward other world leaders as
potential sources for this war. 143
Ludmilla Alexeyeva recalled Khrushchev’s ‘kitchen debate’ with Richard Nixon at
the 1959 American Exhibition as an event that had caused a deep sense of shame in
herself and her friends at the time. 144 A brief account of Khrushchev’s visit to Egypt
gives some indication of his unsophisticated behaviour: ‘He also ate and drank like a
peasant, downing six large sweet cakes at one sitting even after his daughter Rada had
begged him to stop, guzzling brandy and pouring his soup into a saucer and then
drinking it without a spoon’. 145
His ‘shoe-banging’ episode at the UN, plainly
ridiculous boasts about overtaking the US in production of meat and milk, crude
outbursts against the intelligentsia, apparent climb-down in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
141
Interview with Eduard Kuznetsov in L. Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’: ploshchad
Mayakovskogo 1958-1965, Moskva: Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, 1997, p. 223.
142
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 94020, l. 1.
143
One of the best examples to cite in this respect is Khrushchev’s boast to Prime Minister Anthony
Eden in 1956 that Soviet missiles could easily reach Britain. See W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man
and His Era, London: Free Press, 2003.
144
Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, p. 105.
145
Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 611.
171
reputedly frequent drunkenness and unrefined manners all went a long way to
undermining Khrushchev as a credible figure. Again, history has since exonerated
him on a few of these ‘charges’, particularly that of his apparent capitulation in the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
It is particularly notable that the figure of the leader and the legitimacy of the regime
were no longer inextricably linked to the same extent that they seem to have been
under Lenin and Stalin. The above-cited leaflet by Grimm and Khasyanov, and many
others like it, showed that even very bitter opposition to Khrushchev and his clique
did not necessarily equate to rejection of the regime and the goals that it stood for – a
distinction that some authors have suggested was rarely made under Stalin. 146 Carl
Linden broached this subject when he wrote that ‘unlike Stalin, Khrushchev was to a
great extent judged on the success or failure of his policies’. 147 There were undoubted
successes for the regime during the period, most notably with Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of
the earth, yet there were also some painful and embarrassing failures such as the
diplomatic crises over Berlin and rapidly dwindling returns from the much-heralded
Virgin Lands programme.
Veniamin Iofe touched upon this last point when he wrote that ‘the late Khrushchev
years were characterised by arbitrariness and incompetence by the higher political
authorities in various spheres of life that provoked new political activism’. 148 This
theme of incompetence is certainly something that comes across in the anti-Soviet
146
See, for example, C. Gerstenmaier, The Voices of the Silent, New York: Hart Publishing Company,
1972, p.40.
147
C. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990, p. 15.
148
V. Iofe, Granitsy smysla: Stat’i, vystupleniya, esse, Sankt Peterburg: Nauchno-informatsionnyi
tsentr ‘Memorial’, 2002, p. 181.
172
leaflets from the period. However, whether it actually caused a growth of active
dissent is unclear.
3.1.5 LEGITIMACY
The distinction between the legitimacy of the existing leadership and of the wider
regime could be seen in the fact that Lenin was almost never a target of dissenters’
criticism and many dissenters still revered him unquestioningly. As Baron wrote of
the events that took place when striking workers forced their way into a factory
director’s office at Novocherkassk in June 1962: ‘they did not tear down the portraits
of Lenin; it was Khrushchev they reviled. Khrushchev had betrayed the ideals of the
founder, to whom they remained steadfastly loyal. When the next day they marched
with portraits of Lenin and red banners, they were implicitly asserting that they and
not the established authorities were the true legatees of the revolution’.149 In other
words, the legitimacy of the regime as a whole was not in question among the workers
at Novocherkassk, but the legitimacy of Khrushchev and the group around him was.
Taking a slightly wider view of why the legitimacy of the regime was no longer
inextricably bound to that of the leader, it is noteworthy to point out the diminished
personal links to the revolutionary era of those who were now leading the Party and
state. Even though propaganda had subsequently inflated his role immeasurably,
Stalin had indeed been a close associate of Lenin and been a reasonably important
figure among pre-revolutionary Bolsheviks. After Stalin’s death, the top leadership
still had some ties to Lenin and to the state’s revolutionary heritage in the likes of
149
Baron, Bloody Saturday, p. 37.
173
Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich and Kliment Voroshilov among others. 150
By the 1960s these ties to the past were considerably weaker, with only Mikoyan of
the frontline leadership able to claim any real legitimacy as a figure of the
revolutionary era. 151
After Khrushchev’s ouster the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War was to
become a key totem of the regime’s legitimacy, as demonstrated by the widespread
and grandiose memorialisation and the repeated over-inflation of Brezhnev’s own role
in that war. Perhaps because of its association with Stalin, this was not such a
prominent theme of discourse under Khrushchev. Although he had been a political
commissar rather than a direct combatant, Khrushchev had been present for much of
the battle of Stalingrad and for both the unsuccessful defence and eventual liberation
of the Ukraine, yet made relatively little capital out of it. The unceremonious firing of
the popular war hero Marshall Georgy Zhukov from his position as Defence Minister
in October 1957 further demonstrates the extent to which Khrushchev failed to bolster
the regime’s prestige and legitimacy in this respect.
The sense that he had somehow ‘betrayed Lenin’ is interesting because of the
emphasis that had been placed on ‘return to Leninism’ by Khrushchev himself in the
drive to overcome the consequences of the Cult of Personality. From the very outset
there had been no shortage of people, mostly among the intelligentsia, who did not
subscribe to Khrushchev’s brand of Leninism. However, in many such cases this
150
Molotov had been a Party member since 1906, Kaganovich since 1911 and Voroshilov since 1903.
Mikoyan had been a Bolshevik agitator in and around Baku shortly prior to the revolution. Despite
his involvement in the anti-Party group, Voroshilov’s loss of standing was not as severe as that of his
colleagues in the plot. He was titular head of state until 1960 and thereafter a member of the Presidium
of the Supreme Soviet. Despite this he had been effectively sidelined and carried very little stature or
influence. See Taubman, Khrushchev.
151
174
accusation of betraying Lenin was a charge that seems to have been largely devoid of
any ideological basis but was instead principally driven by questions of workers’ selfinterest, such as wages or prices. If something was seen as detrimental to the material
interests of the workers, it was therefore un-Leninist in their eyes. This simplistic
interpretation of Marxism-Leninism in fact reflected the essence of the new contract
between state and society: an acceptable standard of living was to be provided in
exchange for outward political conformity.
One must take care not to overstate the link between criticisms made by dissenters
and the mood in society at large, yet neither were the two entirely unrelated.
Dissenters did not necessarily represent any kind of ‘silent majority’ yet, as this thesis
has repeatedly shown, they were drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds all
across the USSR and were therefore not simply some kind of small and
unrepresentative clique. We cannot say confidently how many people complained
and criticised Khrushchev without coming to the authorities’ attention, though the
available evidence leads one to suspect that this was at times a fairly widespread
trend.
By the time of his ouster there seems to have been little support or even sympathy left
for Khrushchev anywhere.
This was perhaps ultimately demonstrated by the
complete lack of popular protest at his enforced retirement in October 1964.
Furthermore, an August 1965 report from KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastnyi to
the Central Committee on the subject of Khrushchev stated that since his removal
from power, not only had the number of anti-Soviet documents circulating dropped by
around fifty per cent compared to the same period of the previous year but also that a
175
large proportion of those that had been found since then actually expressed
satisfaction at Khrushchev’s ouster. 152
That Khrushchev was unpopular among large elements of the population must have
been well known among members of the Presidium and Central Committee at the
time. Reports came in from the KGB and Ministry of Internal Affairs that alluded to
this unpopularity by describing instances of dissent around the country with phrases
such as ‘abuse of specific individuals among the leadership’ or ‘attacks on a leading
Party and state figure’: this practically always meant Khrushchev. Although it is, of
course, speculation, it makes sense to suggest that knowing the extent of his
unpopularity may have been a factor in the minds of those who plotted to overthrow
Khrushchev in 1964 – at least to the extent that they knew such a move would be
unlikely to arouse any significant show of popular discontentment.
3.2 THE OUTSIDE WORLD
In Stalin’s final years, great effort had been spent on sealing the Soviet Union off
from the outside world, particularly from the capitalist West.153 Very few foreign
visitors entered the USSR and cultural exchange was virtually unheard of. The result
was that the Soviet people were largely isolated from outside information and often
remained naïve about the true state of the outside world and of events in the USSR
itself – something already touched upon in chapter 1.
When the authorities’
monopoly on information was undermined, the massive gap that often existed
152
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 28, l. 2.
However, Solomon Volkov has pointed out that a number of American films that had been seized
during the defeat of Nazi Germany or given as gifts to the state were subsequently screened around the
USSR to eager audiences during the late 1940s and early 1950s. See S. Volkov, The Magic Chorus: A
History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, New York: Alfred Knopf, 2008.
153
176
between state propaganda and reality was to be one of the major catalysts for
declining faith in the regime.
As trust and faith diminished, so the regime’s
credibility came to be ever-more bound to its ability to provide a decent standard of
living.
The opening up of the system began quickly, though hesitantly, after Stalin’s death.
A limited amount of Western literature was published, student exchange programmes
were enacted and foreign tourism encouraged. 154 The primary importance of the
West in regard to Soviet dissent at this time did not lie, as the authorities asserted, in
overt attempts at subversion but in the steady erosion of faith in the regime’s
pronouncements and activities. As Vladimir Bukovsky recalled of the 1957 World
Youth Festival and the 1958 American Exhibition, ‘All this talk about “putrefying
capitalism” became ridiculous. The importance of these events was comparable to the
exposure of Stalin’. 155
The latter part of Bukovsky’s remark may have been
somewhat hyperbolic yet the broader message it conveyed was undoubtedly realistic.
Official propaganda looked increasingly anachronistic when faced with evidence to
the contrary and the credibility of the authorities duly suffered.
3.2.1 LIVING STANDARDS
The issue of poor living standards among the population grew more pressing as it
became evident how far superior conditions were in the West – something that could
be seen in media coverage attacking citizens for ‘praising life in the West’ (see
chapter 4).
Even though the Khrushchev era had begun to bring palpable
154
In regard to the publication of Western literature, see M. Freidburg, A Decade of Euphoria: Western
Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954-1964, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1977.
155
V. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, p. 113.
177
improvements to the lives of Soviet citizens, the system was still found badly wanting
in comparison. Alexis de Tocqueville’s assertion that material grievances become
intolerable once it is made apparent that a better situation exists elsewhere seems
particularly apt in this regard. 156 For years state propaganda had told of inhuman
conditions endured by workers in the West, a factor that had ameliorated the many
privations endured by the Soviet people to some extent, but by the Khrushchev era it
was an increasingly obvious lie of major proportions.
In his study on dissent in the former GDR, Jonathon Grix claimed that citizens there
had been able to use the vastly more successful West Germany as a comparison for
the shortcomings of their own state and that this went a long way to undermining the
prestige of the regime in the eyes of its people.157 Although lacking in the racial and
historical aspects of the German model, the analogy of Soviet citizens looking at the
way that the people of the world’s only other superpower lived would most likely
have had a similar effect. Furthermore, Soviet students and young people were
apparently deeply agitated when they found that even students from People’s
Democracies such as Poland and East Germany invariably had considerably better
clothes than they did. 158 Growing contact with the outside world, therefore, had a
two-pronged impact in this respect: it showed that people had more goods elsewhere
and that the Soviet regime had persistently deceived its people. In the long term this
may well have made communist ideology lose a degree of credibility among the wider
population.
156
See L. Strauss and J. Cropsey eds, History of Political Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987.
157
J. Grix, The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 2000, p.
10.
158
Z. Schakovsky, The Privilege Was Mine, London: Jonathon Cape, 1959, p. 166.
178
The theme of material shortages and hardship was subsequently seized upon and
exacerbated by some Western radio stations broadcasting to the USSR. Gene Sosin –
an early Radio Liberty staff member – recalled that during the Cuban Missile Crisis
Radio Liberty regularly ran messages such as ‘for every Soviet missile in Cuba,
enough money, material and labour have been expended to provide shoes for 25,000
people’. 159
Already inflammatory in a country often lacking basic necessities,
broadcasting such material in late 1962, not long after a period of tension and unrest
sparked by price rises and low wages, would undoubtedly have had some resonance
among those who heard it. It may or may not be a coincidence that the Washington
Evening Star reported in November 1963 that longshoremen in Odessa had refused to
load butter on a boat bound for Cuba because butter had not been available to ordinary
people in Odessa for several months. 160 However, one must be particularly cautious
about putting any great faith in US media reports on Cuba and the Soviet Union,
especially so soon after the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The subject of Cuba raises another interesting aspect of dissenting behaviour in the
Khrushchev period which supports the notion of diminishing enthusiasm among the
people for the communist project: that of criticising Soviet aid to satellite and client
states. One of the leaflets distributed by Grimm and Khasyanov in 1963, mentioned
earlier in the present chapter, shared this sentiment: ‘The Soviet people tighten their
belts every year yet they suffer and stay silent, still clapping for Nikita when
necessary. We work in order to feed ‘unlucky’ Negroes and ‘poor’ Germans yet the
Soviet people have no bread’. 161 The General Department’s correspondence also
159
G. Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoirs of Radio Liberty, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1999, p. 97.
160
Washington Evening Star, 12 November, 1963.
161
GARF, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, l. 24.
179
contains several anonymous letters in which this theme was raised, including one
addressed to Aleksandr Shelepin from Komi ASSR that attacked the domestic
situation and ended with the line ‘The hunger here is because you and your colleagues
are giving all of our products away’. 162
However, this was not a theme that was restricted solely to the Khrushchev era. As
mentioned in chapter 1, calls for subscriptions to aid the Republican side during the
Spanish Civil War had also met with a highly critical response in some quarters even
during the late 1930s. 163 What one could conclude from this is that some of the
Soviet people, and this seems to apply most specifically to workers, had long resented
giving away the fruits of their collective labour while there were major shortages to be
addressed at home. 164 This again demonstrates that the sources of frustration which
afflicted Soviet workers were not always unique to the period or to the Soviet system
but could easily have been reproduced anywhere in the world.
3.2.2 WESTERN RADIO BROADCASTS
Western intrusion into Soviet airwaves increased throughout the Khrushchev period
as the number of stations expanded along with the number of broadcasting hours,
languages and signal strengths. A report sent to Khrushchev from the Ministry of
Culture in May 1956 showed the extent to which this was already a growing problem,
pointing out that there were already 25,000,000 private radio sets in the USSR but by
the end of the sixth five-year plan in 1960 this figure would have risen to around
162
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, l. 2.
See S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia.
164
Private conversations with Russian citizens would seem to suggest that there is still some resentment
at the huge volume of Soviet money and products that were given to client states around the world.
163
180
70,000,000. 165
Even allowing for variable factors such as signal jamming, it is
evident that the potential audience for hostile broadcasts was becoming truly massive.
Its monopoly on information had long been one of the Soviet state’s most effective
weapons against criticism and political heterodoxy, Western radio broadcasting, and
later samizdat too, badly undermined this monopoly.
More than any other broadcaster, it was Radio Liberty that cropped up in investigation
protocols and KGB reports to the Central Committee. As a rule, its broadcasts did not
call for listeners to rise up against the regime but emphasised the need for
democratisation, condemned central tenets of the Soviet system such as
collectivisation and sometimes broadcast banned novels like Dr Zhivago (occasionally
at an intentionally slow speed so that listeners would be able to transcribe the
broadcast and thus eventually have a copy of the book). 166 There were exceptions to
this trend of calling for outright resistance, however, such as when a speech by
Trotsky’s widow, Natasha Sedova, that called for the overthrow of the regime was
broadcast in 1956. 167 The proliferation of broadcasts in non-Russian languages also
made it harder for station bosses in the USA and Germany to control the content of
such shows on account of the fact that they were frequently able to understand only
Russian. As such, shows aimed at non-Russian nationalities were occasionally far
more strident in their criticisms of the regime and did call upon their audience to rise
up. 168
165
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, ll. 17-18.
Sosin, Sparks of Liberty, p63.
167
Sosin, Sparks of Liberty, p. 58.
168
See Sosin, Sparks of Liberty.
166
181
An important matter to note in regard to Radio Liberty in particular is that, in line
with the Soviet regime’s accusations, the station actually was an integral part of US
propaganda efforts against the Soviet regime. Set up, supervised and covertly funded
by the CIA, the long-term goal of the station was not so dissimilar to that which
Soviet authorities alleged; to undermine and discredit the Soviet system in the eyes of
its citizens. 169 The name of its official parent company Amcomlib – an acronym for
‘American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism’, and its staff of Second World
War émigrés and Soviet national minorities clearly suggest that Radio Liberty had a
distinctly political function.
3.2.3 NTS
Even more hostile than Radio Liberty was the Frankfurt-am-Main based ‘People’s
Labour Union’ or ‘Narodno trudovyi soyuz’, known as NTS.
Although largely
neutralised and reduced to a semi-mythical ‘bogeyman’ status by the Brezhnev years,
the organisation was very real during the Khrushchev era and its efforts to stir unrest
inside the Soviet Union were considerable to say the least. 170 For example, a July
1956 report to the Central Committee from KGB chairman Ivan Serov described the
NTS strategy of sending unmanned hot-air balloons packed with anti-Soviet
propaganda materials from bases in West Germany across Soviet and East European
territory, reporting that in the preceding six months a total of 806 balloons had been
found in Ukraine and Belarus, along with Russian oblasts including Moscow,
169
The fact that Radio Liberty was funded by the CIA was not exposed until 1971. The link between
the two was officially severed soon after.
170
Numerous dissidents, including Aleksandr Ginzburg and Yuri Galanskov, were falsely accused of
links to NTS during the Brezhnev era. See J. Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human
Rights, Boston: Beacon Press, 1980, p. 70. Yuri Orlov recalled that even in the late 1970s he had
believed the group to be a fictional invention of the KGB. Yu. Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts: Memoirs
of a Russian Life, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991, p. 205.
182
Yaroslavl, Ivanov, Voronezh, Chelyabinsk, Omsk and Tyumen containing over
106,000 leaflets, brochures and newspapers in total. 171 That this practice continued
into the 1960s could be seen by figures cited in the KGB’s classified history textbook
which stated that over 5,000 such balloons were discovered on Soviet territory during
1961-1962, containing a total of over 1,000,000 anti-Soviet leaflets. 172
A KGB report of 10 June 1960 warned that NTS had been attempting to establish
contacts among Soviet tourists visiting West Germany and trying to persuade them to
smuggle leaflets back into the USSR and to distribute them on their return. 173 NTS
also sent agents into the Soviet Union attempting to incite unrest or otherwise attack
the regime, though without any notable success. There were even rumours that the
organisation operated a mobile radio station from inside the Soviet Union, though
Pavel Litvinov pointed out that, like many oppositional groups, NTS habitually
promulgated entirely false rumours such as this and stated that he personally never
saw or heard any evidence of its existence. 174
This does raise the point that, as with the pronouncements of the authorities on the
subject of dissent, one must be cautious in ascribing validity to any assertions made
by dissenters in this highly politicised and adversarial context. In the case of NTS in
particular, these were generally extremists bearing practically no resemblance to the
171
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 141, ll. 54-56.
V. Chebrikov et al, Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti: uchebnik, Moskva:
Vysshaya krasnoznamenskaya shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri sovete ministerov
SSSR, 1977, p. 543.
173
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 320, l. 12.
174
Interview with Pavel Litvinov, New York, December 2006. Some pirate radio broadcasts did exist
within the USSR around this time, though they were largely limited to playing Western music rather
than political content. See P. Taylor, ‘Underground Broadcasting in the Soviet Union’, Russian Review,
Vol. 31, No. 2, 1972, pp. 173-174.
172
183
well-known, respectable and broadly liberal figures of the later human rights
movement.
NTS did have sporadic successes with its anti-Soviet radio broadcasts, however. In
Stavropol the medical worker (fel’dsher) M.M. Ermizin posted tens of anti-Soviet
leaflets between 1962 and 1964 to local and national newspapers and to the Central
Committee Presidium in the name of NTS, calling for others to produce and circulate
anti-Soviet materials and to hold strikes and risings. 175 A similar example could be
seen in the case against I.I. Unger, I.I. Kuk and V.G. Neifel’d (all ethnic Germans) of
Tomsk oblast’ in which the trio had recorded and transcribed a number of NTS
broadcasts. On 14 October 1962, an election day, they attached copies of these
transcriptions to walls of factory buildings and stuffed them into the ballot box. The
leaflet discovered in a ballot box read as follows:
Voice of the People
NTS calls on you to join the struggle against the Khrushchev dictatorship.
Ask yourself a question: what exactly is ‘Soviet power’?
The radio and press say nothing about many events that are happening
in our country. For example, the rising in Temirtau,
the attempt on Khrushchev’s life at the Soviet-Polish border
and the strikes at the Kirov factory in Leningrad.
Comrades! The time has come to struggle against the existing order.
We have great faith in the strength of the people,
Russia is waking up and we are hearing a new sound.
It is the future!
Of that there can be no doubt!
NTS 176
Although there undoubtedly was a rising at Temirtau around this time (discussed later
in the present chapter), further research has failed to reveal evidence of either the
175
176
GARF. f. 8131, op. 31, d. 97853, ll. 1-13.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 94153, ll. 1-9.
184
strike in Leningrad or the attempt on Khrushchev’s life at the Polish border, raising
the possibility that these events were also fabrications.
It seems that the number of Soviet citizens who responded to the incitements of NTS
was particularly small. As has already been stated at several points during this thesis,
the general desire among most of the populace does not appear to have been for
revolution but for stability and better living standards. Soviet patriotism remained
strong among Russians at least, and the legitimacy of the regime remained largely
unquestioned. This was a fact further supported by Radio Liberty’s own research on
its Soviet audience which found that many people either did not like or felt offended
by anything that was deemed to be sharply hostile toward the Soviet Union. 177
One of the main questions arising from this is how far such broadcasts were
essentially ‘preaching to the converted’ rather than turning previously obedient
citizens into critics of the regime. It seems doubtful that completely loyal Soviet
citizens would have even listened to the more extreme anti-Soviet broadcasts such as
those of NTS. However, those who were wavering in their belief were likely to find
abundant encouragement for their disenchantment, not just in extreme broadcasts but
in those of the BBC and Radio Liberty among others. It seems probable that most
listeners remained passive dissenters and manifested their discontent in less tangible
ways, such as workplace drunkenness and theft.
3.2.4 COMMUNICATING WITH THE WEST
177
V. Petrov, ‘Radio Liberation’, Russian Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1958, p. 105.
185
Among the most interesting facets of the developing relationship between dissenters
and the West was the small but growing volume of communication flowing outward
from the USSR. In the second half of the 1950s communication between Soviet
citizens and the West had been a predominantly unidirectional affair – information
was being broadcasted into the USSR but news about Soviet society was reaching the
West far less often. By the early 1960s dissenters were gradually beginning to open
up a route outwards.
One of the first notable instances of this developing route to the West could be seen in
Yuri Galanskov’s utilisation of links with foreign journalists to transmit information
on the riots that took place in Murom and Aleksandrovsk during 1961. 178 The main
significance of sending this information to the West arguably lay in the extent to
which it both foreshadowed and contrasted with the human rights activity of the
Brezhnev years. After hearing rumours of the risings in Murom and Aleksandrov,
Viktor Khaustov, Eduard Kuznetsov and Vladimir Osipov immediately visited the
towns in order to gather information on what had happened. They then wrote up the
details in leaflet form and sent them abroad through Galanskov. This was similar to
the kind of activity that would later characterise the information gathering practices of
the Chronicle of Current Events. 179 The contrast, which provides a useful illustration
of the distinction between dissent under Khrushchev and under Brezhnev was that, as
opposed to the sober and rigorously factual work of these later reports, the trio
178
Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’, p. 221.
The Chronicle of Current Events was a regular samizdat journal of the Brezhnev era containing
factual reports on the regime’s abuses of human rights around the country. Founded in 1968, the
Chronicle was published and distributed secretly and appeared 63 times before disappearing in 1983.
See P. Reddaway ed, Uncensored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union, New York:
American Heritage Press, 1972. The website of Memorial carries a digitised back catalogue of the
Chronicle of Current Events. See http://www.memo.ru/history/diss/chr/index.htm.
179
186
produced a heavily romanticised and politicised account of what were to some extent
hooligan uprisings.
A growing number of Soviet citizens were arrested and jailed as a result of attempts to
communicate with the West around this time. As mentioned in chapter 1, in many
cases this involved correspondence with organisations such as Radio Liberty or NTS
whereby Soviet citizens wrote to ‘safe addresses’ that were usually located in Holland
or West Germany. However, not all cases were entirely as they seemed.
Nina
Barbarchuk, a doctor from Minsk, was jailed in January 1962 after writing a series of
anonymous letters to US President John F. Kennedy during December of the previous
year. One letter held in Barbarchuk’s case file included a warning to the President of
her own doubts about the Soviet regime’s desire for peace and outlined the poor living
standards and frustrations of the Soviet people. 180 As an educated citizen it seems
doubtful that Barbarchuk could have reasonably expected her letter to reach the US
President – care of the American embassy in Moscow – without being intercepted.
This would suggest that Barbarchuk was perhaps using the letter to President
Kennedy as an oblique channel of communication between herself and the Soviet
authorities in order to make clear the extent of people’s dissatisfaction. 181
3.2.5 CHINESE ANTI-SOVIET AGITATION
Foreign involvement in anti-Soviet activity was not restricted to the West, however.
One of the less well-known themes of dissenting behaviour in the Khrushchev era is
the role of Chinese anti-Soviet agitation.
180
The catalyst for China’s ideological
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 91673, ll. 23-25.
See V. Kozlov, and S. Mironenko eds Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve,
1953-1982, Moskva, Materik, 2005, p. 120.
181
187
antagonism against the Soviet authorities was the Sino-Soviet split – a fact that could
be seen in the extent to which Khrushchev was a prominent target of Chinese
propaganda attacking the Soviet regime. On 4 May 1963 KGB chairman Vladimir
Semichastnyi reported to the Central Committee that China was ‘continuing to send
propaganda into the Soviet Union’ and that in April 1963 alone over 5,000 Chinese
anti-Soviet brochures had been discovered and confiscated by the KGB. 182 This was
followed on 20 May by a further communiqué that explicitly linked the Chinese
regime to such documents. An informer named Chzhao Pin-Khyan reported to the
KGB that the Chinese embassy in Moscow had been preparing anti-Soviet materials
and forcing Chinese students studying in the USSR to distribute them. Furthermore,
the report also claimed that regular meetings and seminars were held at the Chinese
embassy in which Soviet domestic and foreign policy were slandered along with
members of the leadership – most likely meaning Khrushchev. 183
By January 1964 the Chinese had also begun using radio to transmit their ‘schismatic
views’ in broadcasts amounting to eight hours per day according to the KGB. 184 It
was soon discovered that the Albanian regime had been colluding with the Chinese in
this behaviour. A report from the Ministry for the Protection of Public Order dated 8
January 1964 stated that over 2,000 anti-Soviet leaflets had been discovered at the site
of the recently vacated Albanian embassy in Moscow while others had been posted to
356 individuals and official organisations around the country including libraries,
newspapers and embassies. 185
182
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 424, l. 67.
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 424, l. 82. As stated earlier in the present chapter, this kind of formulation
was usually employed to refer to attacks on Khrushchev.
184
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 435, ll. 1-2.
185
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, l. 8. The Ministry for the Protection of Public Order (MOOP) was
established in Russia after the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) was abolished in 1962 and its
183
188
Chinese anti-Soviet agitation was not without some success, particularly in the
Eastern provinces of the USSR where their radio signals were strongest. In August
1963 Komsomol members G.A. Svanidze, L.M. Kizilova and V.S. Miminoshvili were
caught pasting up leaflets in Batumi that called for Khrushchev to be overthrown and
declared ‘Our leader is Mao-Tse Tung!’ 186 In December of the same year, I.M.
Panasetskii was sentenced for writing graffiti on walls in Chernigov oblast’ with
slogans including ‘Long Live the KPK’ (the Chinese Communist Party) and ‘Long
Live Mao Tse-Tung’. 187 Leaflets supporting the Chinese position on various political
questions were discovered in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in the Tatar
and Bashkir ASSRs along with Novosibirsk and Omsk oblasti. 188 Others, such as a
former Party worker named Fedoseev and several underground groups, including one
named the ‘Organisation of Idealistic Communists’, had attempted to establish
contacts with representatives of the Chinese regime and offered to share ‘hostile
materials’ with them and to otherwise agitate on their behalf according to the KGB
report. 189 What this clearly demonstrated was that the individuals in question were
not anti-communists but were disenchanted at the prevailing ideological situation in
the USSR.
The role played by the outside world in dissenting behaviour during the Khrushchev
period can be divided into two distinct categories. The first can be seen as overtly
subversive; activity promoted by the likes of NTS or the Chinese, aimed at directly
powers were passed to republican ministries of internal affairs. During the Brezhnev period the
organisation reverted back to its former name.
186
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 96151, ll. 1-3.
187
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 95901, l. 1.
188
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, l. 112.
189
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 435, ll. 3-6. Unfortunately, the report did not give any details on exactly
what these ‘hostile materials’ consisted of.
189
provoking disturbances and resistance to authority. While this may have occasionally
yielded some immediate results its impact was almost entirely superficial and shortterm, not least because for many people those who were attempting to incite
resistance and disturbances were even less appealing than the existing Soviet regime.
As such, the kinds of foreign-inspired subversive activity that the authorities feared
most were actually rather rare.
The second way that the outside world came to impact upon political dissent was by
exposing the Soviet regime’s failures, lies and hypocrisy. This largely resulted from
the less overtly hostile broadcasts of stations such as the BBC, Voice of America or
Radio Liberty and in the simple process of Soviet citizens coming into contact with
their Western counterparts. While this may not have provoked an impassioned and
immediate response from dissenters, the long-term result was an ever-growing
cynicism that left the regime ideologically holed and ensured that obedience became
increasingly dependant upon the state’s ability to adequately fulfil basic needs such as
employment and the provision of goods.
3.3 UNDERGROUND ACTIVITY IN THE EARLY 1960s
As stated in chapter 1, Maurice Hindus seems to have been correct in arguing that the
Soviet underground of the late 1950s ‘hid no bombs and manufactured no guns’. 190
One could not say the same thing about the first half of the 1960s, when underground
activity distinctly became more hostile in tone and more subversive in its aims.
Marxist-Leninist ideology continued to predominate in this sphere yet a growing
190
M. Hindus, House Without a Roof: Russia After Forty Three Years of Revolution, London: Victor
Gollancz, 1962, p. 383.
190
number of dissenters that participated in underground activity no longer felt that the
incumbent regime could be fixed but now had to be replaced.
These changing trends of clandestine activity reflected the fact that the underground
was no longer so dominated by students and the intelligentsia. This was partly
because the intelligentsia began to move toward more open and legalistic forms of
dissent in the early 1960s, and partly because underground workers’ groups started to
appear. The former theme is discussed later in the present chapter; the latter probably
reflected the extent to which there was no legitimate outlet for sharp criticism as well
as the fact that there was still a certain romanticism attached to underground activity.
For the most part, these acts of dissent offered little in the way of realistic alternatives
to the perceived failures of the existing system but instead traded in a rhetoric that was
imbued with a sense of revolutionary romanticism which lacked any real substance.
Many such groups can be seen as ‘playing at revolution’ and ultimately achieved
practically nothing in the way of concrete activity, yet the growing extremism in
terms of the language that they used and the demands that they made remains
significant. Ultimately, this reflected the fact that the sense of disillusionment at the
regime seemed to be deepening among dissenters.
3.3.1 GROWING DISILLUSIONMENT
What had largely begun as disappointment at the authorities’ failure to live up to the
apparent promise of liberalisation that was offered by the Secret Speech had already
spread to antipathy toward the ruling authorities and was gradually beginning to touch
upon the regime as a whole. Again, it is worth emphasising that this did not mean the
191
regime had lost legitimacy in the eyes of all Soviet citizens but it does go some way
toward explaining the cynicism and stagnation that seemingly characterised the
Brezhnev period.
One symptom of this spreading disillusionment at the political authorities was the
growing influence of the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas’ stinging critique against
the state of the Soviet regime, The New Class (1957). 191 His fundamental argument
stated that the Soviet Union was no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat on the path
toward communism but had become a dictatorship of the bureaucracy, permanently
mired in self-interest. Although The New Class was banned inside the USSR, copies
began to appear and Djilas’ ideas soon emerged primarily among the intelligentsia but
also among some working class dissenters. It was for attempting to reproduce a copy
of The New Class that Bukovsky was first jailed in 1963.
A leaflet that was distributed in Donetsk, Zhitomir, Rovensk and Lugansk oblasti
during May 1963 gives some indication of the themes and language that featured
among underground dissent in the late Khrushchev period:
191
Djilas had been a high-ranking member of the Yugoslav regime until his split with Tito in early
1954. He was then expelled from the government and Party before being jailed in 1956. It was while
in prison that he wrote The New Class.
192
ALL UNION DEMOCRATIC FRONT –
REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC PARTY
The reaction is coming. Khrushchev is reviving Stalinism.
His plan spells disaster.
The people are rising for the struggle
We demand
1. 100 roubles minimum wage.
2. A 30 hour working week.
3. Minimal bureaucracy and militarism
4. Democratic freedoms.
5. Legalisation of the VDF and RSDP. 192
6. Amnesty for political prisoners.
The state order in our country is a bureaucratic clique
based on the exploitation of the workers.
Our aim is to replace this order with
socialist democracy.
Comrades!
The struggle has begun.
The strike movement is widening.
The soldiers are refusing to fire on the people
All to the ranks of the revolution!
We will win!
Down with Khrushchev’s reactionary clique!
Long live socialist democracy!
Long live the fourth Russian Revolution! 193
Over 800 copies of this particular leaflet were scattered in the streets and sent by post
to various private individuals and political figures.
The subsequent KGB
investigation confiscated a further 1,221 copies that had either already been
distributed or were ready for distribution. The interrogation revealed that the main
culprit, V.I. Bul’binskii, had prepared the leaflets alone but had been assisted in
handing them out by the three others, including a student named N.M. Trofimovich –
who had already scattered 1,200 leaflets in Odessa and Rovensk – and the former
192
VDF refers to the All-Union Democratic Front (Vsesoyuznyi demokraticheskii front) and RSDP
refers to the Revolutionary Social Democratic Party (Revolyutsionnaya sotsial-demokraticheskaya
partiya).
193
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, l. 67.
193
prisoner S.A. Babich – who had distributed over 1,000 leaflets around Zhitomir. 194
Particularly indicative of the changing times was the sheer volume of leaflets
involved.
Again and again one finds reports and interrogation protocols from the early 1960s in
which leaflets and brochures were discovered in their hundreds or even thousands
whereas in the 1950s a total of even twenty copies was quite rare. For example, the
case of Grimm and Khasyanov that has already been cited in the present chapter
involved 500 leaflets.
In February 1963 Galina Zakharchenko and Viktor
Khozyainov were arrested after distributing over 2,000 leaflets in Vinitsa and
Zhitomir, in September of the same year an underground group calling itself ‘Oreol’
distributed around 200 leaflets in Frunze (Kirgiz SSR) and in April 1964 the so-called
‘Democratic Union of Socialists’ distributed over 850 leaflets including statements
such as ‘the dictatorship of the Party means freedom for communists and
unquestioning obedience for the vast majority of people’. 195
This trend of high
print-runs of these anti-Soviet leaflets could be seen in countless other cases besides.
One can see the influence of Djilas’ political philosophy in Bul’binskii’s statement
that read: ‘the state order in our country is a bureaucratic clique based on the
exploitation of workers’. 196 That the leaflet concluded with a call for citizens to ‘join
the ranks of the revolution’ is indicative of one of the most fundamental differences
between the political dissent of the Khrushchev era and the human rights activity of
the Brezhnev era. The former most frequently relied upon the threat of domestic
194
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, ll. 69-71.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 95164, ll. 1-4, GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 96174, ll. 3-4 and RGANI. f. 5,
op. 30, d. 454, l. 72.
196
GARF, f. 8131, op. 30, d. 412, l. 67.
195
194
unrest as its main lever for applying pressure on the authorities while the latter
primarily relied upon Western public opinion and diplomatic pressure.
The big
difference was that the threat of civil unrest was for the most part a hollow one and
was furthermore fraught with even greater danger since the safeguarding of domestic
stability remained the authorities’ single greatest priority. Reliance on the West was
dangerous too, and often frustrating for dissidents, but it did offer some protection for
those who spoke out.
The importance of material concerns – already shown in Bul’binskii’s leaflet – was
demonstrated in numerous reports sent by the KGB to the Central Committee’s
General Department. For example, on 30 December 1961 anti-Soviet leaflets were
pasted up on walls in the centre of Chita with remarks including ‘Loudmouth
Khrushchev – where is your abundance?’ and ‘Comrades! How much longer will we
live half-starving and destitute?’. 197
An anonymous letter sent to the Central
Committee presented the situation as follows: ‘There are five million people who are
living under communism – they are the government and the ministers. Ten million
are living under socialism – these are the directors, generals, engineers and
bureaucrats. The other one hundred and eighty five million of us are waiting for
socialism and do not even know what it is.’ 198
Again, one can clearly see the
resentment at privileges enjoyed by the elite and criticism at Khrushchev’s boasting
which contrasted sharply with widespread discontent at the low living standards
endured by the bulk of the population.
197
198
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 378, l. 28.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 82931, l. 1.
195
Incidentally, this problem was not unique to the Soviet system. A note sent by the
KGB to the Central Committee in 1962 stated that the Bulgarian security organs (the
Darzhavna Sigurnost or DS) were experiencing similar forms and themes of protest,
reporting that 529 investigations had been initiated as a result of anonymous letters
and leaflets that year alone, predominantly complaining about high food prices. Like
their Soviet counterparts, the Bulgarian security organs placed the blame for this kind
of activity squarely on capitalist subversion. 199 Whether they were simply following
the Soviet regime’s lead in this respect is unclear but it is again worth raising the point
that foreign powers actually were attempting to carry out subversion in the socialist
bloc on occasion, just as members of the socialist bloc were undertaking subversive
activity in Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere.
3.3.2 1962-1963
The year 1962 saw a major resurgence of clandestine dissenting activity; a fact that
was demonstrated by a KGB report from 25 July of that year. It stated that in the first
half of 1962 the security organs had recorded 7,705 different anti-Soviet leaflets and
documents distributed by 2,522 authors – a figure twice as high as that of the same
period in 1961.
The main centres of dissenting activity were the Ukraine,
Azerbaidzhan, Georgia, Latvia, Stavropol, Krasnodar, Rostov, Leningrad and
Moscow. 200 According to the report, these documents were characterised by themes
including calls for active struggle against the Soviet authorities, malicious attacks on
individual leaders, nationalist attitudes, lack of faith in the building of communism
and slander of Soviet democracy. A growing number also expressed hatred of the
199
200
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 424, l.30.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 1, ll. 1-4.
196
CPSU and made terrorist threats against communists, Komsomol members and
members of the Party aktiv. 201 This kind of tone had been particularly rare in the
second half of the 1950s.
A survey of a few cases that arose in the first six months of 1963 gives some
indication of this growing tendency toward extremism. A group of three citizens from
Sverdlovsk oblast’ fashioned themselves as ‘The Revolutionary Party’ and produced a
programme of action in which they pledged to establish contact with the embassies of
capitalist states, to acquire weapons and launch a wave of terror against the authorities
and to carry out agitation work inside the army. The group was uncovered and its
participants were arrested in January 1963 while attempting to attract new
members. 202 On 13 March 1963, and then again on 31 August and 1 September, over
100 anti-Soviet leaflets were discovered in Tashkent that had been produced by the
‘Secret Terrorist Union’ – though there appears to be no record of group members
being arrested. 203 In June 1963 the Belarusian KGB arrested three participants of an
underground group in Minsk, the members of which had managed to acquire several
firearms and explosives and had produced detailed plans to blow up Minsk radio
station number 3 and to attack a local militia station. 204
The above cases serve to highlight the extent to which underground activity had come
to reflect an increasing degree of alienation from the existing regime among some
dissenters. It is also true, however, that even though they may have been entirely
earnest, most groups did not get the chance to put their militant programmes into
201
RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 1, l. 1.
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, ll. 34-35.
203
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 429, l. 88.
204
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, ll. 70-77. As the next section of the present chapter will show, attacks
on militia stations also occurred elsewhere around this time.
202
197
action. In the case of the Petr Grigorenko’s underground group, ‘The Union of
Struggle for the Restoration of Leninism’, Andrei Grigorenko – himself a member of
the organisation – conceded that although the group’s leaflets spoke of uprisings and
revolution there was never any effort made to acquire weapons or to plan any kind of
rising. 205
Underground groups seem to have been particularly isolated from the
population, partly because of their extremism and partly because of the need for
secrecy in order to evade the attention of the KGB.
It appears that the period of 1962-63 was to be the last time that underground activity
was such a major feature of dissenting behaviour until it later began to re-emerge
under Gorbachev. 206 This could be seen by a June 1964 KGB report stating that a
significant reduction in the volume of anti-Soviet documents in circulation had been
noted. It was announced that in the first five months of 1964 a little over 3,000
leaflets and letters had been discovered as compared to approximately 11,000
documents found during the same period of the previous year. 207 When one adds to
this a report from Semichastnyi to the Central Committee in August 1965, which
stated that the volume of anti-Soviet documents had dropped by over half in
comparison with the same period of the previous year, it is possible to see a marked
decline in progress. 208
One can point to numerous reasons for the decline in this form of dissenting activity.
After the events of summer 1962 in particular, the authorities took the danger posed
205
Interview with Andrei Grigorenko, New York, October 2006.
This re-emergence of underground dissent in the Gorbachev era was apparently a response to the
perceived failures of the Brezhnev era dissident movement, which was effectively crushed by the early
1980s. See L. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and
Human Rights, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. 384.
207
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, ll. 110-111.
208
RGANI, f. 89, op. 5, d. 28, l. 2.
206
198
by worker dissent more seriously and accordingly took new measures to forestall it,
such as deeper KGB penetration of workplaces and greater use of informers among
society. However, what seems to have been by some way the most important reason
for the move away from underground dissent was that since a considerable volume of
protest and criticism was prompted by material dissatisfaction it naturally declined as
the authorities increased their efforts to provide an acceptable standard of living.
3.4 MASS DISORDERS
The greater social volatility of the early 1960s was not only evident in attacks on
Khrushchev and increasingly hostile underground activity but, most famously, in the
series of public disorders that occurred among workers, culminating in what Rudolf
Pikhoya referred to as ‘an explosion of popular discontent at Khrushchev’s policies’
in the summer of 1962. 209 In an article entitled ‘Uprisings that the country did not
know about!’ the newspaper Novoe vremya listed fourteen different cities that had
experienced
significant
Novocherkassk,
disturbances
Aleksandrov,
between
Murom,
Nizhnyi
1960
and
Tagil,
1962,
Temirtau,
including
Odessa,
Dneprodzerzhinsk, Lubna, Kuibyshev, Kemerova, Krivoi Rog, Groznyi, Donetsk and
Yaroslavl. 210 Again, the point to emphasise here is the extent to which this was a
period of real domestic turbulence that arguably had the potential to spiral out of
control yet has been largely overlooked in many accounts of the era. 211
209
R. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya vlasti, 1945-1991, Moskva: Rossisskaya akademiya gos.
sluzhby pri Prezidente Rossiisskoi Federatsii, 2005.
210
Novoe vremya, April 22, 1991. Exactly what constituted a ‘significant disturbance’ remains unclear
from the text of the article.
211
The most notable exception to this has been the Russian historian Vladimir Kozlov whose work on
the theme remains very much authoritative. See V. Kozlov, Massovye Besporyadki v SSSR pri
Khrushcheve i Brezhneve, 1953-1980gg, Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf, 1999 or in translation: V.
Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years, London: M.E.
199
These disorders were almost exclusively made up of workers and were bore clear
similarities to the kind of spontaneous public outbursts against the authorities for
which so many individuals were jailed during 1957 and 1958. The fact that acts of
group protest could turn violent like this not only says something about the extent to
which those involved were embittered by the present situation but also of the way that
people have long behaved in crowds, especially when drunk and angry. It seems quite
clear that something had changed within society for such a proliferation of large
public disorders to occur in what was still being labelled by some seasoned observers
as a totalitarian system. 212 Essentially, Charles Zeigler was correct to argue that the
threshold whereby material dissatisfaction turned into violence, among workers in
particular, had been significantly lowered. 213
There were a multitude of overlapping reasons for this working class volatility in the
late Khrushchev years, such as declining fear of, and respect for the authorities, raised
aspirations and growing public cynicism to name just a few.
What this again
demonstrates is that with rule by terror abandoned and the relative material wealth and
stability of the Brezhnev era not yet in place, this was very much a transitional phase
of Soviet history.
Sharpe, 2002. Samuel Baron’s work on the rising at Novocherkassk, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet
Union: Novocherkassk, 1962, is also a vital addition to the field.
212
See, for example, Schapiro, L. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London: Methuen & Co.,
1970.
213
C. Ziegler, ‘Worker Participation and Worker Discontent in the Soviet Union’, Political Science
Quarterly, Vol.98, No.2, 1983, pp. 235-253.
200
3.4.1 DISTURBANCES IN THE LATE 1950s
A relatively brief survey of some large-scale disturbances during this period gives an
indication of their tone and position in the wider scenario of dissenting behaviour.
Although already touched upon in chapter 1, it is worth revisiting briefly the disorders
in Tbilisi during March 1956. Anger had begun to spread in the Georgian capital
once the content of the Secret Speech became known and an angry mob of
approximately 70,000 gathered around a Stalin monument in the centre of town. 214
The next day and the day after, 8 and 9 March, angry crowds again gathered in the
centre of Tbilisi and the atmosphere turned even more volatile, with key buildings
being stormed and occupied by demonstrators. When soldiers tried to disperse the
crowds on March 10 they encountered violent resistance and tanks were brought in
with hundreds of arrests and tens of deaths soon followed. What the events in Tbilisi
showed was that when citizens protested en masse, it was now they, rather than the
authorities, who were usually first to become violent.
The disturbances that took place during the Virgin Lands programme of the late 1950s
were largely provoked by ethnic tensions between settlers and the indigenous
population, and as such were manifested in gang fights in which the authorities tended
to come between warring factions. This trend was also reflected in the disorders
which took place between returning members of the deported nationalities and those
who had since settled in the places they had been banished from. This was most
214
Kozlov, Mass Uprisings, p. 115.
201
extreme in Groznyi, where conflict between returning Chechens and Russians
provoked a murder that ended in mass riots and pogroms during August 1958. 215
The only notably politicised uprising of the Virgin Lands campaign took place at
Temirtau in Kazakhstan from 1-3 August 1959 when over 500 workers,
predominantly from Belarus and the Ukraine, protested at poor living conditions by
erecting barricades in the street, throwing rocks at members of the militia and then
looting shops and warehouses. A subsequent commission set up to investigate the
event reported to the Central Committee in September 1959 that protesters had written
graffiti on walls such as ‘anarchy is the mother of order’ along with shouting slogans
in demand of a shorter working day, higher wages and the right to go on strike. 216
3.4.2 DISTURBANCES IN THE 1960s
The June 1961 disorders in Murom (Vladimir oblast’) had been sparked after a
worker died whilst held in police custody and a rumour began that he had been killed
by the militia. 217 Three days later the worker’s funeral procession descended into a
mass riot after mourners attacked a local police station. Kozlov has argued that
‘…hardly any of the activists thought that, dissolved within the anonymous crowd,
they were carrying out something more serious than their typical hooliganism’. 218 It
is true that there was an element of common hooliganism in most of the mass
disorders of the Khrushchev period yet this does not imply that they were, therefore,
215
Gang fights also flared up in Dagestan, Ingushetiya, Kalmykiya and elsewhere during the same
period.
216
RGANI, f. 3, op. 12, d. 576, ll. 30-48.
217
Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR. In fact, the man in question had died of a brain haemorrhage
incurred during a drunken accident for which he had originally been arrested.
218
Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR, p. 198.
202
apolitical. For example, the subsequent Procurator report on events in Murom stated
that protesters did significant damage to the militia and KGB buildings; breaking
windows, doors and furniture, severing telephone connections and stealing official
documents and a large quantity of firearms: this was clearly not just looting for
personal gain. 219
The following month, partly inspired by events in Murom, another major disturbance
was registered in nearby Aleksandrov after a fracas, that had begun when a policeman
arrested a pair of drunken soldiers, quickly degenerated into a riot.
Again the
subsequent disorders were short-lived and localised but involved extensive alcoholfuelled hooliganism and anti-police sentiment. With Murom and Aleksandrov being
situated on the edge of Moscow’s ‘101 kilometre ring’ – inside which many
‘undesirables’ were not permitted to reside – they both featured an unusually high
proportion of released prisoners and known ‘trouble-makers’. 220 One could perhaps
speculate that the risings therefore demonstrated some kind of residual anger at the
Soviet regime that could quickly flare into violence under the right circumstances.
The pinnacle of this rising tide of social volatility was witnessed at Novocherkassk in
June 1962.
The rising there included over 5,000 protesters and ended with 62
individuals being convicted of anti-Soviet activity (seven of whom were sentenced to
death) as a result of their part in the demonstrations and left an estimated 24 dead and
100 wounded. 221
KGB reports from that summer give an idea of the scale of
discontentment all around the country, referring to angry crowds, calls for strikes or
219
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 91127, ll. 1-5.
It is of some importance to point out that the mass releases which drained the Gulag population after
Stalin’s death included a large proportion of thieves and violent criminals.
221
Baron, Bloody Saturday.
220
203
demonstrations and terrorist threats occurring in cities including Riga, Kiev, Perm,
Minsk, Krasnoyarsk, Moscow, Gor’kii, Tambov, Donetsk and Chelyabinsk among
others. 222
That the discontent around the country was linked to the 17 May
announcement of price rises on a range of staple goods has been well established, yet
there were also other factors. There was a growing anger at the discrepancy between
the living standards of officials and ordinary citizens. Massive state banquets and
officials’ perks were contrasted by the fact that further restrictions had recently been
placed on peasants’ private plots. 223
That acts of dissent showed an increasing
bitterness should probably come as no surprise in light of this.
3.4.3 NOVOCHERKASSK
One of the most important catalysts that made the rising at Novocherkassk turn so
extreme was a raise in the work norms at the town’s main factory.224 Nonetheless, as
with Murom and Aleksandrov, it required a specific, local event to spark off mass
unrest. This local catalyst was the insensitive and inappropriate reaction to workers’
complaints by the factory director B.N. Kurochkin. On hearing concerns at the
impact of the new rises Kurochkin retorted that ‘if there isn’t enough money for meat
and sausage let them eat pies (pirozhki) made from liver’. This was apparently the
‘spark that touched off the powder keg’. 225 It again shows that acts of protest among
workers in particular tended to be caused by resentment at specific individuals or
events rather than at the Soviet system overall. Although these actions probably
222
See RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 12, ll. 1-4 and RGANI f. 89, op. 6, d. 14, ll. 1-3.
Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, p. 177.
224
The factory in question was the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works (NEVZ)
225
Baron, Bloody Saturday, p. 26.
223
204
reflected a considerable element of pent-up frustration, it seems likely that this would
not have crossed over into active dissent if it were not for specific local events.
At around 8 am on the morning of June 1 the factory workers decided to go out on
strike. Within a matter of hours the military had been brought in and attempts to
make the protesters return to work by force only served to heighten their indignation.
The striking workers, with women and children alongside, marched from the outlying
factory district toward the centre of town, gathering sympathisers along the way yet
the procession remained peaceful.
When it became evident that the crowd would not be met by a delegation that had
been hurriedly flown in from Moscow (headed by Anastas Mikoyan, Frol Kozlov,
Aleksandr Shelepin and Andrei Kirilenko), the mood turned more hostile. 226
Frustration boiled over and the more aggressive elements in the crowd forced their
way into the town’s Party building and began to ransack and vandalise the place.
Soon afterward a group of the demonstrators attempted to release prisoners from the
police station (there were in fact none there by that time) and it was then that the
armed forces began to fire into the crowd that had gathered outside the town’s gorkom
building, killing dozens of people and wounding hundreds more.
Aside from insisting that overall there had been few complaints and most people
agreed that the price rises were a good and necessary measure, a subsequent KGB
report of 7 June 1962 was surprisingly candid but nonetheless incomplete in its
content.
It stated that the workers had been justifiably angry at poor levels of
226
As the crowd headed toward the centre of Novocherkassk the decision was taken for the deputation
to be evacuated from the Party building in the centre of town to a nearby military base.
205
workplace safety and some wages had decreased by up to thirty per cent and that the
local Party committee knew about this growing discontentment but did nothing to
tackle it. 227 What it singularly failed to mention, however, was that the situation
would most likely never had occurred were it not for the raft of price rises.
With tensions high across the country in the wake of the June 1962 price rises it
seems entirely feasible that if society at large had been aware of the rising in
Novocherkassk and the way in which it was violently put down, it could have
triggered an untold degree of domestic strife.
The most immediately striking
comparison is with the events surrounding the Bloody Sunday massacre of January
1905 (a theme that is alluded to in the title of Baron’s volume on Novocherkassk)
which prompted months of rebellion across Russia after government forces fired into
a crowd of petitioners outside the Winter Palace. That the authorities also seem to
have drawn this analogy with 1905 could be seen in the fact that great effort was
expanded on preventing news of the events from leaking out of the city both while the
rising was underway and for many years after. 228
It is worthwhile to consider how workers’ protest had come to take on such a drastic
tone and what this said about their relationship with the authorities. One point that
has to be raised is that 1962 witnessed a qualitatively different kind of protest because
of the nature of its immediate catalyst. Unaffordable prices, like unavailable goods,
were always likely to provoke a different calibre of response to less tangible issues
227
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 16, ll. 1-3.
Naturally, rumours did quickly emerge that something major had taken place in the region yet they
remained unsubstantiated for some time. The first Western report appeared in the French newspaper
Paris-Presse on 27 July yet was somewhat inaccurate. Samuel Baron recalled that even during the late
Gorbachev period he found few people in Novocherkassk who were willing to talk about the event with
an outsider. See Baron, Bloody Saturday, p. 108.
228
206
such as foreign policy or stalled liberalisation because, at their most extreme, they
presented a question of survival rather than one of political principles. 229 Their goals
may not have been primarily political but to suggest, as some authors have in the past,
that Soviet workers showed no revolutionary potential is to underestimate the danger
that these mass disturbances posed. 230
The events at Novocherkassk provide further evidence of the new social contract that
was emerging between state and society. What had long been apparent to Stalin’s
successors, that living standards would have to be raised appreciably if the regime
were to survive in the long term, was brought into focus more sharply than ever
before. It became quite clear to the authorities that they could no longer act with
virtual disregard for the popular mood without provoking a potentially ruinous
response. As the next chapter will show, disorders around the country ultimately
forced the Soviet authorities to take the public mood into greater account before
taking major decisions.
It is also important to point out that, in so far as we know at present, there were no
public disturbances on this kind of scale during the later part of the Stalin period or at
any time under Brezhnev. Here one can again point to the fact that the Khrushchev
era was a time of transition; highly repressive policing had been discredited but the
relative prosperity and more sophisticated social control of later years were not yet in
place. What the summer of 1962 showed most of all was that although ordinary
people generally did not stand in opposition to the Soviet regime, they did demand
229
It is worth reiterating here that Khrushchev had also recently imposed further restrictions on the
cultivation of peasants’ private plots, meaning that not only were many people already angry but that
they were even more reliant upon buying goods which they could no longer afford.
230
See, for example, F. Barghoorn, Détente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR, London:
Collier Macmillan, 1976, p. 168.
207
that it provided an acceptable standard of living and were liable to respond with real
force if the circumstances presented themselves.
3.5 A PRECURSOR TO THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT
One of the key factors in the development of intelligentsia dissent in the late
Khrushchev era was the lack of room for even quite mild criticism.
Educated
professionals who were essentially loyal to the regime but continued to harbour
reservations about specific policies were increasingly required to remain silent and
‘toe the line’. Most ultimately acquiesced and returned to the fold, but others did not.
There was still no dissident movement to speak of but it was at this stage that initial
networks were being forged and new kinds of dissenting behaviour were emerging,
particularly in Moscow. The names of some of those involved in various forms of
dissenting activity at this stage constitute a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the Soviet human
rights movement: Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Galanskov,
Aleksandr Ginzburg, Petr Grigorenko and Andrei Amalrik to name just a few.
Whereas previously students and other educated dissenters had shown a tendency
toward clandestine activity, the early 1960s witnessed the start of a general move
toward the kind of behaviour that would later characterise the more open and
legalistic dissident activity of the Brezhnev years. With the inexorable decline of
faith in Marxism-Leninism that took place among disgruntled elements of the
intelligentsia around this time, the early 1960s were effectively a period of searching
208
for new philosophies and forms of expression. This was, according to Veniamin Iofe,
a process that had been largely completed by the middle of the decade. 231
3.5.1 MAYAKOVSKY SQUARE
Among the key events in intelligentsia dissent were two series of unofficial poetry
meetings held at Mayakovsky Square in Moscow. The first series of gatherings had
begun in 1958 and ended in early 1960; the second began at the end of that year and
lasted into the autumn of 1961. The initial meeting had begun as a spontaneous affair
after the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in
1958. After officially approved speakers had given readings, enthusiastic members of
the crowd took it upon themselves to continue the evening by giving their own
recitals. Having enjoyed the evening, many of the participants arranged to meet again
a week later and soon the readings were taking place regularly.
Initially the
authorities had looked quite benignly on these gatherings but became increasingly
uneasy about them as time passed, often employing volunteer police (druzhiniki) to
intimidate and apprehend participants approaching the Square. 232 By the spring of
1960 the authorities had managed to put a stop to the meetings.
They were then revived in September 1960 on the initiative of Vladimir Bukovsky
and Vladimir Osipov and again drew large crowds on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Over the course of the next year these poetry readings would go on to play a crucial
role in bringing together various nonconformist elements from Moscow and
231
Iofe, Granitsy smysla, p. 119.
The druzhiniki were a volunteer police force intended to complement the work of the militia. The
organisation was founded in 1959 and recruited its members by levying quotas on local factories and
enterprises. It seems that most who participated did so grudgingly. See L. Shelley, Policing Soviet
Society: The Evolution of State Control, London: Routledge, 1996.
232
209
elsewhere. While many who attended the readings did so as poetry lovers rather than
dissenters, there was also a strong political undercurrent to events – a fact that is
perhaps not surprising since Vladimir Bukovsky recalled that his main motivation for
resurrecting the sessions was to draw together like-minded critics of the regime. 233
He was not alone in this – Apollon Shukht (one of the attendees and a close friend of
many participants) suggested that Vladimir Osipov too had conceived of the meetings
as something akin to the Petöfi Circle that had played such an important role in
triggering the Hungarian rising. 234
Events were not just restricted to the public gatherings in the centre of Moscow.
Participants also used to gather at friends’ apartments in the centre of the city and hold
‘salons’ consisting of anything between ten and thirty people, where conversations
turned far more open and critical than anything that was said during the readings at
Mayakovsky Square. There was no attempt to form any kind of unified group among
the participants yet most were on friendly terms and spoke of similar notions such as
democratisation, loss of faith in socialism and the desirability of establishing some
form of loyal opposition to the existing regime. 235
It was in these salons and
friendship groups (kompanii) and others like them throughout the capital that many of
the personal and philosophical bonds that later united members of the dissident
movement were first forged.
233
Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Cambridge, March 2007.
Interview with Apollon Shukht in Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’, p. 66. The Petöfi
Circle was a group of young Hungarian communists – named in honour of the Hungarian national poet,
Sander Petöfi. Formed in April 1956, the group’s meetings quickly became highly critical of the state
of the Hungarian regime and helped provoke workers and intellectuals into the protests and uprising
that followed.
235
Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’ p. 114.
234
210
As Alexeyeva wrote of her own experiences of the time: ‘kompanii were initially
about dancing to jazz, drinking vodka and talking till dawn’. 236 They later became
arenas where samizdat was shared, philosophies were debated and lifelong friendships
were formed. It was also in these groups that the fusion of politics and culture
became more pronounced and where dissenters began to co-ordinate their activity
before ultimately becoming a relatively coherent movement around the middle of the
decade.
One of the more interesting comments from Lyudmila Polikovskaya’s collection of
interviews with Mayakovsky Square attendees (‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’,
1997) was provided by Zinaida Eskina. She stated that even when the authorities
began to put pressure on participants by summoning them for ‘chats’ with the KGB
and had several expelled from their universities, they were still not scared and had
always known that they were taking a risk. 237 This was very much the same kind of
ethos that many members of the subsequent human rights movement lived by – again
reflecting the degree of continuity between the attitudes and activities of the late
Khrushchev period and the Brezhnev era dissident movement.
One must also consider whether this was an accurate reflection not only of other
participants’ emotions at the time but also of Eskina’s own. Her name does not
feature as having been an active dissenter at this period or any other, suggesting that
attendance at the Square was perhaps her sole act of overt defiance against the regime.
The fact that Polikovskaya’s interviews were conducted in the mid-1990s, when it
236
Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, p. 83.
Interview with Zinaida Eskina in Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’, p. 127. In the same
interview Eskina also mentioned that she recalled Joseph Brodsky coming to Moscow from Leningrad
and hearing him read his work at one of these salons.
237
211
was relatively fashionable in some quarters to salute those who had struggled with the
regime in the Soviet days, may also have facilitated a slightly romanticised recall of
events. It is therefore important to bear in mind that, whether she had consciously
intended to or otherwise, Eskina may have presented a portrait of events that was
somewhat at odds with the way things actually happened.
On the other hand, assuming that Eskina’s recollection was accurate, and there is no
overt reason to doubt this, it provides a telling snapshot of the domestic situation as it
stood at that time. Firstly, it is again worth flagging up the extent to which this kind
of behaviour would have been unthinkable not just a decade earlier but even five
years previously. Furthermore, it not only demonstrates the extent to which fear of
the authorities had diminished in some quarters of society but also the way in which
culture, and literature in particular, was fusing with politics as both a theme and a
form of intelligentsia dissent.
Although the authorities had immediately begun to apply various forms of pressure on
those who attended the meetings, it was not until October 1961 that they came to an
end. The reason for this halt was the arrest of two of the organisers – Vladimir
Osipov and Eduard Kuznetsov – who had plotted an attempt on Khrushchev’s life. 238
The pair had long been at the political extreme of those who participated in the
meetings at Mayakovsky Square, apparently leaning toward a broadly anarchosyndicalist philosophy, but had in fact been persuaded to call off the plot by
Galanskov, Bukovsky and a few others shortly before the fateful day. Nonetheless,
238
The plot had been drawn up by an acquaintance named Anatolii Ivanov and the assassin was to be a
man named Vitalii Rementsov. Both of these two were arrested and subsequently confined in
psychiatric institutes.
212
the KGB got wind of the plot, arrested those involved and undertook a general
crackdown across the board. 239
The demonstration at Pushkin Square on 5 December 1965, held in order to demand
glasnost’ in the forthcoming trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, is widely
acknowledged as having been the first collective protest for the observance of human
rights in the USSR, yet philosophically, and perhaps for some also physically, the
road to Pushkin Square seems to have begun at Mayakovsky Square. These were the
first open and entirely peaceful meetings held in defiance of authority right in the
centre of the capital and, moreover, featured at their core numerous individuals who
were later to feature among the regime’s most prominent critics. 240
3.5.2 SAMIZDAT
The meetings at Mayakovsky Square also proved to be occasions on which large
volumes of forbidden literature regularly changed hands and were integral to the birth
of several of the earliest samizdat journals. Samizdat literature, generally viewed as
the backbone of the entire dissident movement, was not only growing in volume
during the early 1960s but was also becoming more politicised as alternative
philosophies were gaining acceptance while Marxism-Leninism declined. What this
meant was a further series of breaches in the regime’s vital information blockade as
well as the establishment of an unofficial forum for debate and discussion. Samizdat
was, according to Solomon Volkov, ‘one of the main reservoirs of intellectual
239
Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha.
See P. Litvinov, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square, London: Harvill Press, 1969; N. Kostenko,
et al eds. Pyatoe dekabrya 1965 goda v vospominaniyakh uchastnikov soytii, materialakh samizdata,
dokumentakh partiinykh i komsomol’skikh organizatsii i v zapiskakh komiteta gosudastvennoi
bezopasnosti v TsK KPSS, Moskva: Memorial, 1995.
240
213
opposition’ to the Soviet authorities. 241 Importantly, it was very much a phenomenon
that had distinct roots in the Khrushchev era.
Aleksandr Ginzburg, often regarded as the pioneer of samizdat, had already produced
three volumes of his anthology Syntaxis (Sintaksis) featuring uncensored work by
Moscow and Leningrad writers (among the most notable of whom were Bulat
Okudzhava and Joseph Brodsky) before he was arrested whilst preparing a fourth
edition in July 1960. Following Ginzburg’s arrest, Mayakovsky Square attendees
Vitalii Skuratovskii and Anatolii Yakobson produced Cocktail (Kokteil’) while Yuri
Galanskov compiled the almanac Phoenix (Feniks) and Vladimir Osipov set up
Boomerang (Bumerang).
Prompted by the authorities’ success in putting an end to
the meetings, Mikhail Kaplan then released two volumes of Sirens (Sirena) in the first
half of 1962 – both were dominated by the works of people who had read out their
work at Mayakovsky Square. 242
3.5.3 THE LEGALIST APPROACH
The most significant outcome of the trial of Osipov and Kuznetsov in the spring of
1962 proved to be the growing credence of legalistic forms of dissent that were being
espoused by Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin.
His numerous experiences of the state’s
repressive apparatus under both Stalin and Khrushchev had convinced Volpin that the
authorities had to be faced openly and with knowledge rather than with threats and
arms. 243 It was an argument that few had taken seriously at first.
241
Volkov, The Magic Chorus, p. 180.
See V. Igrunov, ed. Antologiya samizdata: nepodtsenzurnaya literatura v SSSR 1950-1980, Tom 1
Kniga 2, Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyi institute gumanitarno-politicheskikh issledovanii, 2005.
243
Interview with Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, Revere, Massachusetts, November 2006.
242
214
Although trials like that of Osipov and Kuznetsov were declared ‘open’, in reality
they were very much closed to the public. Nonetheless, Volpin had studied the Soviet
constitution, learned his rights under the law and demanded access to the trial.
Vladimir Bukovsky summed up Volpin’s successful entry in the following way:
“Little did we realise that this absurd incident, with the comical Alik Volpin
brandishing his criminal code like a magic wand to melt the doors of the court, was
the beginning of our civil rights movement and the movement for human rights in the
USSR”. 244 The creation of the human rights movement was not quite that simple, of
course, but this undoubtedly was a pivotal moment that demonstrated the changing
dynamics of dissenting behaviour. What Volpin had done was to hasten a change in
the rules of engagement between dissenters and authority.
There were several reasons for the decline of underground dissent among the
intelligentsia. Perhaps the most important was that, as Petr Grigorenko entitled his
famous book: ‘in the underground one can meet only rats’. 245 His view, and that of a
growing number of others at the time, was that reliance on what were seen as
Bolshevik means of struggle could ultimately only produce a new dictatorship and all
the negativity it would entail – exactly what most dissenters among the intelligentsia
did not want. Another important factor was that underground dissent had proved
itself almost entirely ineffective. It was an irritant for the authorities but seems to
have made no real impression on the public mood. Indeed, it seems highly probable
that, rumours aside, ordinary people knew practically nothing concrete about this kind
of activity. The serious risks that group members took in producing and distributing
244
Bukovsky, To Build A Castle, p. 131.
See P. Grigorenko, V podpol’e mozhno vstretit’ tol’ko krys, N’yu Iork: Detinets, 1981. This was the
conclusion reached by Grigorenko after his own group, the Union of Struggle for the Restoration of
Leninism, was arrested in February 1964.
245
215
manifestos or leaflets simply did not produce any kind of tangible return among
society.
In Leningrad – a city generally depicted as one where underground activity continued
to flourish for some time – the situation was a little different. Valery Ronkin’s
Kolokol group came together in the summer of 1964 and subsequently distributed a
Djilas-inspired manifesto entitled from dictatorship of the bureaucracy to dictatorship
of the proletariat which spoke of overthrowing the regime with a Hungarian-style
revolution. 246 Others, however, leaned toward a more Russian nationalist ethos, such
as the All-Russian Social-Christian Union and The Path (Put’).
Procurator records show that people all around the country continued to be arrested
and sentenced after sending anonymous anti-Soviet letters and, less often, distributing
leaflets. As the middle of the decade approached a growing proportion of the state’s
attention was again turned toward nationalist and religious dissent, particularly group
activity. One occasionally still encounters underground political groups toward the
middle of the 1960s but with far less frequency than in previous years.
Outside of Moscow it becomes much harder to piece together a pattern in regard to
the evolution of intelligentsia dissent. It remains unclear whether this is primarily
because acts of protest and criticism became less common or because evidence of
these acts has not yet come to light. Open acts of defiance, such as the Mayakovsky
Square poetry readings, would have been a far more risky undertaking in the
provinces where the authorities were less constrained by factors such as the presence
246
See Iofe, Granitsy smysla p. 120.
216
of the Western media. Perhaps the most important point to raise in this respect is that
the available evidence is too scant to indicate anything definitively.
3.5.4 KHRUSHCHEV AND THE LIBERAL INTELLIGENTSIA
It also appears that the evolution away from more subversive forms of intelligentsia
dissent could be partly attributed to the fact that dissent had begun to draw in a
growing number of educated professionals whose attitudes had previously been on the
margins of what was deemed acceptable and unacceptable. Within the scientific
community, for example, there was growing disquiet at the continued official support
for the ‘charlatan biologist’ Trofim Lysenko. 247 Simmering resentment burst into the
open when Lysenko was publicly denounced by a number of leading physicists in
1962, including Petr Kapitsa – later a Nobel laureate – yet Lysenko retained his
dominance in the field. It was not just his controversial, and ultimately false, work on
‘hybridization’ that riled his fellow scientists but the fact that he had marginalized and
denounced many within the scientific community who had opposed him and his
acolytes. 248
Two years later, in June 1964, Andrei Sakharov too weighed in with an attack on
Lysenko and his followers, an act that he later recalled as an early landmark on his
247
See Zh. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, New York: Columbia University Press,
1969.
248
Lysenko had risen to prominence in the 1930s. His work essentially rejected Mendel’s principles of
genetic inheritance, claiming instead that crop yields could be increased and ripening times reduced by
what he called ‘acquired characteristics’ – ‘teaching’ wheat to grow in spring or places where it would
not normally grow, for example. These were ideas that had long been bereft of credibility elsewhere in
the world but had seemingly offered a way out of the USSR’s chronic agricultural problems and so
caught Stalin’s eye. Lysenko continued to enjoy predominance under Khrushchev, though he was
quickly sidelined at the accession to power of Leonid Brezhnev in October 1964.
217
way to becoming an active dissenter. 249
In resisting a proposal that Lysenko’s
associate Nikolai Nuzhdin be elevated to full membership of the Academy of
Sciences, Sakharov took the rostrum and rounded on Nuzhdin, stating that ‘…together
with academician Lysenko, he is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet
biology…, for the adventurism, for the degradation of learning and for the firing,
arrest, even death of many genuine scientists’. 250
The event that Sakharov had considered his first foray into what he called ‘civic
activity’ had actually come two years earlier when he protested to Khrushchev about
the decision for the USSR to resume nuclear testing in 1962. The result was a
strongly worded rebuke from Khrushchev in which Sakharov was warned not to
meddle in politics. As Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs ‘this disagreement left its
mark on Sakharov’. 251
The tentative alliance that had existed between Khrushchev and the liberal
intelligentsia during earlier years was not to survive to the end of the period.
Although the relationship had been through numerous ups and downs already by the
early 1960s, it reached a new low point after Khrushchev’s outburst against nonconformist artists at the Manezh gallery in December 1962. On visiting the exhibition
which included numerous abstract paintings, Khrushchev soon flew into a rage,
crudely abusing some of the artists and threatening to send several of them to logging
249
See A. Sakharov, Memoirs, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990, p. 235. Sakharov heard rumours that
when Khrushchev found out about his attack he ordered KGB chief Semichastnyi to begin gathering
compromising material on the physicist.
250
Sakharov, Memoirs, p. 234.
251
S. Khushchev ed. Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev: Volume 2, Reformer, Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2006, p. 493. That Khrushchev had personally been Lysenko’s patron could be seen
in the fact that almost immediately after Khrushchev’s overthrow in October 1964, Lysenko too was
disgraced and demoted.
218
camps in the far north. This was, it seems, the result of a provocation engineered by
Mikhail Suslov, intended to facilitate an attack on the liberal wing of the cultural
establishment. 252 The aftermath of this attack saw conservatives driving home their
advantage over powerful liberals and their supporters, taking almost complete control
within the cultural establishment and finally closing off the avenue of ‘permitted
dissent’ in the cultural sphere.
Shortly before this decisive turn toward conservatism in the cultural sphere, the
November 1962 edition of the celebrated liberal literary journal Novyi Mir had carried
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s seminal debut novella One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich. This was undoubtedly the most daring publication to come out of the
Khrushchev period, and one that the First Secretary himself had pushed through
against the resistance of several colleagues. 253
At home and abroad, the success of Ivan Denisovich was huge, with successive print
runs selling out almost immediately.
The massive domestic success of Ivan
Denisovich unquestionably proved that Stalin’s Gulag was a subject that remained
close to the surface within society. The subsequent explosion of Gulag literature ‘had
an enormous impact on Soviet society and, in fact, altered the ideological climate in
the country. With each new work, it became increasingly evident that Stalin’s terror
252
See Zezina, Sovetskaya khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya; F. Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First
Russian Spring: The Era of Khrushchev Through the Eyes of his Adviser, London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1991.
253
Numerous accounts exist of Khrushchev’s personal involvement in the publication of Ivan
Denisovich. Aside from Solzhenitsyn’s own memoirs the most informative and revealing works are V.
Lakshin, Solzhenitsyn, Tvardovsky and Novy Mir, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1980 and P. Johnson,
Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-1964, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1965.
The wider impact of the story is covered at some length in Zh. Medvedev, Ten Years After Ivan
Denisovich, London: Macmillan, 1973.
219
had possessed deep roots…’ 254 The result was that all the awkward questions arising
from the abuses of the previous era were brought back into focus. In addition to this,
the international acclaim that greeted Ivan Denisovich was ultimately to provide
Solzhenitsyn with a platform from which to air his many criticisms of the Soviet
regime.
3.5.5 JOSEPH BRODSKY, ANDREI SINYAVSKY AND YULI DANIEL
In what can be seen as an important forerunner of the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and
Daniel, the arrest and sentencing of the young Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky
demonstrated that the tide had turned definitively against the relative cultural
liberality of previous years. Having already subjected Brodsky to official censure
when he was caught attempting to pass illicit materials to Western tourists, and having
had two friends sentenced for anti-Soviet activity, he was surely a marked man for
some time prior to his arrest. However, according to a KGB report it had been
decided that Brodsky would not be jailed for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda as
he was both too young and ‘insufficiently hostile’. 255 Instead, a case was constructed
under parasitism legislation in what can be seen as a key show trial that marked an
intensification of the government’s drive to silence the liberal intelligentsia. 256
254
Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals, p. 112.
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, ll. 98-100. On the basis that this information was contained in a KGB
report it seems likely that the decision not to try Brodsky for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda had
been taken by the security organs.
256
Philip Boobbyer, for example, has suggested that the Brodsky trial was effectively the first in a
series of show trials that culminated with that of Aleksandr Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. P. Boobbyer,
Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 77. Solomon Volkov
has concurred with this assessment. See Volkov, The Magic Chorus, p. 234.
255
220
A KGB report to the Central Committee from May 1964 showed that the creative
intelligentsia were reacting negatively to the persecution of Brodsky. Writers’ Union
members Lev Kopelev, Raisa Orlova and Lidiya Chukovskaya were quoted by the
KGB as stating that the trial represented a return to Stalinism. The poet Evgeny
Evtushenko described the trial as ‘fascistic’ and others, including the director Samuil
Marshak, the celebrated children’s author Kornei Chukovskii and composer Dmitry
Shostakovich, promised to undertake a petition in defence of Brodsky. 257
Although there was never any doubt in regard to the outcome of his trial, it was
nonetheless notable for the fact that Brodsky vigorously defended himself against the
accusation that he was a social parasite. He was also ably supported by a number of
key defence witnesses who testified to both his skill as a poet and his willingness to
work. 258 Presumably because of the standing of supporters such as Anna Akhmatova,
Brodsky’s case began to draw international attention and he was eventually released
from exile in the far north of Russia ahead of schedule in October 1965. However,
the fact that Brodsky’s early release came at the same time as the arrest of Sinyavsky
and Daniel was most likely not a coincidence.
Had Brodsky been a young poet from Moscow rather than Leningrad it may well have
been the case that his trial would have provided the spur for events that followed the
arrest and sentencing of Sinyavsky and Daniel almost two years later. As it happened,
Khrushchev was soon overthrown and, contrary to rumours circulating amongst the
intelligentsia at the time, a period of relative calm between the liberal intelligentsia
257
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, ll. 98-100.
Burford Jr, R. ‘Getting the Bugs Out of Socialist Legality: The Case of Joseph Brodsky’, The
American Journal of Comparative Law, 1974, pp. 465-501.
258
221
and the authorities followed until the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel re-ignited the
standoff at the end of 1965. 259
Because it occupies such a prominent place in the historiography of Soviet dissent it is
worthwhile to look briefly at the lineage of the January 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and
Daniel.
Although integral to the cycle of protest and repression that occurred
throughout much of the Brezhnev era, it was actually a sequence of events that was
deeply rooted in the preceding Khrushchev years. Andrei Sinyavsky, an employee of
the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, had begun to send his works abroad for
publication under the pseudonym Abram Tertz in 1959 and his co-defendant Yuli
Daniel had done likewise since 1961 under the pseudonym of Nikolai Arzhak.
The KGB investigation against the pair had been initiated in the early 1960s but for
several years had produced no success in uncovering Tertz and Arzhak or even
verifying that they definitely were writing from within the Soviet Union. 260 In early
1964 the investigation led detectives to Yuli Daniel and from there to Sinyavsky. For
several months they were monitored along with others involved in the smuggling
operation and were finally arrested in September 1965.
The point to be made here is that the traditional association which is made between
the persecution of the two writers and the conservatism of the Brezhnev regime has
been somewhat overstated: the pair’s dissenting activity, the KGB investigation, and
259
The main rumour doing the rounds was that a list existed bearing the names of about a thousand
liberal intellectuals who were to be arrested. See A. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: A Literary
Memoir, London, Collins and Harvill, 1980, p. 90.
260
C. Andrew, and V. Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret
History of the KGB, New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 535. That the KGB took so long to uncover the
writers is rather curious as their identities were not a particularly well kept secret in the Moscow
kompanii of the time. See Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation p. 118.
222
by implication the events that followed it, were all deeply rooted in the Khrushchev
years.
3.6 CONCLUSIONS
The second half of the Khrushchev era witnessed some truly embittered acts of protest
and criticism that indicated a growing antipathy toward the regime as a whole. KGB
reports stretching across the duration of the period show that tens or even hundreds of
thousands of anti-Soviet leaflets and letters were distributed or posted and well in
excess of a hundred underground groups of various political shades were uncovered.
While the first half of the period had arguably been characterised by frustration at the
stalled progress of deStalinisation, the 1960s saw resentment increasingly focused on
the ruling political authorities. The sense of utopianism that had been evident in the
late 1950s had largely evaporated and, although Marxist-Leninist ideology continued
to dominate many dissenters’ political philosophy, there was an increasing sentiment
that the regime could no longer be ‘fixed’ but required fundamental change.
The most notable theme of intelligentsia dissent in the second half of the Khrushchev
era was that the scene was quite clearly being set for the confrontation between
dissenters and authority that took place throughout the Brezhnev era. On the side of
the dissenters many of the leading figures of the human rights movement had already
emerged as critics of the regime and had become embroiled in the cycle of repression
and reaction that would characterise the dissident movement. The principle of relying
on open, legal struggle had begun to take root and key tools such as samizdat
literature and communication with the West had either emerged or were in the process
of establishing themselves.
223
It remained the case that most acts of protest among workers were prompted by
specific incidents, people and policies rather than any kind of wider rejection of the
Soviet regime. As the numerous uprisings of the period demonstrated, Soviet workers
were by no means unquestioningly obedient and were more than capable of venting
their frustrations at the authorities. While worker dissent displayed a growing degree
of cynicism in regard to the authorities this was, by the later stages of the period,
increasingly kept in check by rising living standards and increasingly effective
methods of social control.
Even more than the earlier part of the Khrushchev era, the gulf between worker
dissent and that of the intelligentsia remained pronounced: the former demanded
material improvement and the later wanted political reform. There were a multitude
of reasons why workers and members of the intelligentsia never found common
ground, not least of which were the authorities’ efforts to prevent such an alliance by
methods such as presenting an image of the intelligentsia as ‘eggheads’ and ‘cry
babies’ according to Kagarlitsky. 261
Unlike the intelligentsia, the working class had the sheer number of people and the
forceful manner of protest to engineer change yet their desires were ultimately rather
limited. Lenin had perhaps been correct to argue that without the guidance of the
intelligentsia the workers would only ever develop a ‘trade union mentality’, as
discontent among the working classes was effectively ‘bought off’ by the regime after
the disorders of 1962. From that point onwards overt dissenting activity was largely
261
B. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present,
London: Verso, 1989, p. 110.
224
reduced to a small core of the Moscow intelligentsia and, according to Alexei
Yurchak’s research, was of little relevance to most people’s everyday lives. 262
After a somewhat tumultuous period around 1962, the relationship between society
and the regime began to settle down again as the middle of the decade approached.
The measures taken were essentially aimed at neutralising the threat of major unrest
among the working class, and thus reducing the threat to the regime’s stability. What
the dissenting activity of this period in particular had achieved was to demonstrate to
the authorities that society’s compliance could not be taken for granted but had to be
earned and maintained.
262
A. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 106.
225
CHAPTER 4
OFFICIAL RESPONSES TO DISSENT: 1959-1964
While the development of policy against dissent during the early Khrushchev period
was largely characterised by a sense of trial and error, the first half of the 1960s saw
the authorities employing a more consistent and thought out approach. Neither the
uncertainty of the immediate post-Secret Speech period nor the ‘fire-fighting’
approach that had followed the December letter were to be repeated. Instead the
regime began to develop a more sophisticated and varied corpus of policy whereby
greater efforts were made to prevent dissenting behaviour among the population in the
long term as well as continuing to employ punitive responses against those remaining
dissenters who were perceived as being genuinely anti-Soviet.
Less serious
transgressions were treated with greater lenience while more serious offences
continued to be met with a harsh punitive response: naked coercion was no longer the
only response to dissent but it did remain an option for the authorities. 263
In many ways the regime’s responses to dissenting behaviour were becoming
markedly less Stalinist in that they came to see the use of camp and prison sentences
as a last resort rather than a default reaction. The ever-growing reliance on ‘soft’
methods of social control, such as prophylactic measures, succinctly demonstrated
this fact. Nonetheless, the authorities’ more outwardly restrained approach continued
to be backed up by the application of severe punitive measures against hundreds of
dissenters.
263
See F. Feldbrugge, ‘Soviet Criminal Law. The Last Six Years’, The Journal of Criminal Law,
Criminology and Police Science, Vol. 54, No. 3, September 1963, p. 263.
226
What these factors and others, such as the growth of psychiatric confinement,
demonstrate is that by the early 1960s one can see very clear continuities with the
struggle against dissidents that took place during the Brezhnev era.
That the
authorities’ principal aim was to minimise and stifle criticism rather than to eradicate
it was increasingly evident, as was the fact that rationalisation rather than
liberalisation dictated responses to dissent.
New restraints upon the authorities
appeared and existing ones became more important, such as improvements in the legal
system and a desire to avoid negative publicity abroad, yet ultimately the regime was
still willing and able to disregard any such factors if domestic stability was deemed to
be at stake.
It is evident that a new relationship between society and the regime had been just
about established by the time of Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964. In particular,
the authorities had become increasingly cautious of provoking widespread discontent
within society. As Kozlov wrote: ‘The lessons of the early 1960s pushed the Party
leadership into a search for means of compromise in the conflict between authority
and the people’. 264 In practice, this meant that those whose discontent was based on
material factors were largely placated or intimidated into silence, while those with
genuinely political grievances were ostracised or crushed.
4.1 POLICING DISSENT
As dissenting behaviour had begun to take on a more consistent and stable form by
the end of the 1950s, so the authorities too increasingly honed their tactics and
264
V. Kozlov, Neizvestnyi SSSR: Protivostoyanie naroda i vlasti 1953-1985, Moskva: Olma-Press,
2006, p. 408.
227
practices of policing. Stalin-era investigators and security agents had been replaced
by people who were better educated and trained, without direct involvement in the
crimes of previous years. Reviews and reorganisations of the camp and prison system
were conducted, the KGB was reorganised and slimmed down and new legal
guidelines were enacted as the process of rationalisation continued. While the second
half of the 1950s can arguably be seen as a time when the regime began to move away
from the most brutal aspects of its Stalinist past, it was during the early 1960s that
new policies began to crystallise and the Brezhnev era system of policing society
began to take hold.
4.1.1 THE LEADERSHIP
For the most part, members of the top leadership were less actively involved in the
minutiae of the struggle against dissent than they had been in the 1950s. However,
they were still kept abreast of the most important developments around the country in
general and particularly during times of heightened unrest such as summer 1962.
While the Central Committee Presidium was provided with occasional summaries of
dissenting behaviour, its General Department received regular updates from the KGB,
and less frequently from the Ministry of Internal Affairs or Procurator’s office, on
specific instances of protest and criticism around the country as and when they took
place.
Often these reports related to foreign attempts to stir unrest inside the USSR or to the
exposure of underground groups and supposed terrorist plots, but information about
even quite banal occurrences could also be sent practically to the top of the political
228
ladder. For example, when three anti-Soviet leaflets were found scattered in the halls
of the Central Lenin Museum in Moscow during June 1964, the case was brought to
the attention of the General Department.
This gives a useful indication as to where the policing of dissent lay among the
regime’s priorities and of the role that the General Department played as a ‘clearing
house’ for a whole range of information that was key to policy formation and
implementation. For the vast majority of the time dissent would probably not have
been a subject that occupied the likes of the First Secretary or other top leaders,
according to Sergei Khrushchev. 265 Instead, the law enforcement agencies seem to
have been left to conduct affairs without the kind of constant interference that had
been the case under Stalin. The KGB’s own history textbook stated it was they rather
than the Central Committee Presidium that began to take the more active role in
drawing up measures to deal with dissent in this period. 266
There were, however, a number of cases in which members of the top leadership did
become actively involved in dealing with dissent. We know that when Aleksandr
Esenin-Volpin’s philosophical treatise A Leaf of Spring was smuggled out of the
USSR and published in the West in 1961 it prompted Leonid Il’ichev, head of the
Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda, to declare that the
tract displayed ‘hatred toward Soviet society and the Soviet people’ and to brand the
author ‘pretentious and illiterate’ as well as ‘mentally ill’ – a denunciation that most
likely led to Esenin-Volpin’s subsequent spell of psychiatric incarceration. Evgeny
265
Interview with Sergei Khrushchev, Rhode Island, December 2006.
V. Chebrikov et al, Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti: uchebnik, Moskva:
Vysshaya krasnoznamenskaya shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri sovete ministerov
SSSR, 1977, p. 581.
266
229
Evtushenko – a poet who will be forever associated with deStalinisation – even stated
at the same meeting as Il’ichev that Volpin was ‘scum’. 267
The most notable instance where the leadership did play a direct role in responding to
dissent was in relation to the rising at Novocherkassk. Mention has already been
made in the preceding chapter of the fact that a delegation composed of high-ranking
figures was immediately dispatched to the town – showing just how concerned the
leadership was by the developing situation. 268 It seems that, as in Hungary, the
delegation was expected to report back to Moscow on how events were developing
but were perhaps also supposed to make recommendations back to the centre on how
to proceed and to placate the protesters. 269
The composition of this delegation was in itself significant. Its most senior figures
were the hard-line conservative Frol Kozlov and the more moderate Anastas
Mikoyan. This duo practically embodied the authorities’ policy against dissent at the
time. As Samuel Baron argued: ‘While one (Mikoyan) could explore the chances for
a peaceful solution, the other (Kozlov) could be relied upon to crack down should the
situation warrant’. 270
This bore a close resemblance to the way that events had
panned out in Budapest six years previously (that time Mikoyan had been dispatched
as Khrushchev’s envoy and was accompanied by arguably the era’s most
unreconstructed hardliner, Mikhail Suslov). As in Hungary, Khrushchev had hoped to
267
B. Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol’pin and the Idea of Rights Under
“Developed Socialism”’, Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 4, Winter 2007, p. 650.
268
The delegation included four of the eleven Central Committee Presidium members - Frol Kozlov,
Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Kirilenko and Dmitrii Polyanskii. Alongside this quartet were included
former KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin and the previously mentioned Leonid Il’ichev.
269
As a point of interest, it is worthwhile to note that Samuel Baron suggests that Mikoyan had hoped
to stay in the town and to address the crowd personally yet others, most notably Frol Kozlov, insisted
that the delegation retreat to a safer location. See S. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union:
Novocherkassk, 1962, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
270
Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union, p. 47.
230
avoid violence but was willing to take a more aggressive stance if he thought it
necessary. Again he found the exhortations of conservatives within the leadership the
more convincing and ultimately sanctioned the use of force, which saw the protest end
with a bloodbath.
What we can see, therefore, is that while Khrushchev was liable to take daring and
even reckless risks in fields such as foreign policy, he was less inclined to do so at
home. This not only demonstrates the fact that domestic stability continued to be the
regime’s single over-riding priority but also emphasises the point that notions of
Khrushchev as a ‘liberal’ and of the era as one of ‘thaw’, can be misleading. As was
shown in the campaign against dissent of 1957 – 1958, the authorities were quick to
revert to a more repressive approach when the possibility of significant unrest
surfaced.
In this sequence of events one can determine several notable factors at work that
reflect upon the wider state of the regime at the time. Most noticeable was the
division that existed between what can be broadly categorised as liberal and
conservative elements and the fact that representatives of both groups were sent to
Novocherkassk, seemingly in order to balance each other out. 271
In regard to
Khrushchev, one can see that he was not by nature a leader inclined to ruthlessness
but in a tight spot tended to hedge his bets with conservatives instead of liberals. It is
also clear that violence against the people was seen as a last resort but by no means an
impermissible one; showing that the regime did indeed continue to reserve the right to
271
The sphere in which this practice of balancing liberals and conservatives has been most widely
examined is literature. See, for example, E. Rogovin-Frankel, Novy Mir: A Case Study in the Politics
of Literature, 1952-1958, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
231
resort to more brutal and characteristically Stalinist methods, as Leonard Schapiro has
suggested. 272
From a closer examination of events, one can also see that the demonstration at
Novocherkassk was forcefully put down not just because it was a protest and thus
deserved to be punished but because of the regime’s fear that events could spread to
the surrounding area and beyond. This was demonstrated by the fact that all road and
telephone links with the outside world were immediately cut by the authorities and the
town held in an effective state of quarantine for several months afterward.
As
tensions died down and investigations against the demonstration’s ringleaders went to
trial, the authorities broadcast the harsh sentences on local radio (which included
seven who were subjected to the death penalty) in order to intimidate the locals into
silence. 273 However, they also made a point of shipping additional food supplies to
the town in order to placate the local population – showing that the regime wished to
restore order among the masses just as much as they wanted to punish those who were
guilty.
4.1.2 THE WORK OF THE KGB
After the campaign against dissent began to be wound down in 1958 one of the
authorities’ main tasks was to put in place a means of stifling protest and criticism in
the long term. For the KGB this firstly meant tackling the efforts of anti-Soviet
organisations based outside of the USSR in order to minimise their influence on
272
L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, London: Methuen, 1970, p. 611.
The last point is particularly indicative of the authorities’ ability to subvert their own laws because
the 1958 Law on State Crimes had expressly stated that the death penalty would no longer be applied to
those jailed for anti-Soviet activity and propaganda, which included participation in mass disturbances.
273
232
Soviet society. NTS became a particular object of the security organs’ attention as
undercover KGB agents penetrated its structures at practically every level. From then
on, when NTS agents were dispatched to the USSR they were almost immediately
apprehended by the authorities and neutralised. With most KGB materials from the
period still classified, one can say little of how successful or otherwise this focus on
foreign centres of anti-Soviet agitation actually was, yet the organs’ internal history
textbook boasts of uncovering and liquidating ‘many military and political plans
aimed at the Soviet Union and other socialist powers’. 274
Similarly, threats and intimidation were used against those who broadcast to Soviet
audiences from the West. Gene Sosin recalled that Soviet agents were ‘planted’ at
Radio Liberty by the KGB, émigrés working at the station’s Munich offices regularly
received silent telephone calls, threats and letters from relatives in Soviet Union
begging them to stop slandering the regime and to return to the USSR.
Most
significantly, two Radio Liberty staff members were murdered – almost certainly by
the KGB according to Sosin. 275
This new focus on matters outside of the USSR did not prevent the security organs
from taking stock of things at home too. On 19 July 1962 a report was sent from the
Administrative Organs Department to the Central Committee which effectively
constituted a review of the regime’s policies against dissent. To give some idea of the
report’s significance it is worthwhile to point out that it included the signatures of
Aleksandr Shelepin, Vladimir Semichastnyi, Matvei Zakharov, Roman Rudenko,
274
Chebrikov, Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, p. 563.
G. Sosin, Sparks of Liberty: An Insider’s Memoir of Radio Liberty, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1999, p. xiv.
275
233
Vadim Tikunov and Petr Ivashutin. 276 These men were the former KGB chairman,
presiding KGB chairman, deputy KGB chairman, the head of the Procurator’s Office,
head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the head of military intelligence
respectively.
The report stated that the KGB had penetrated deeper into workers’ organisations and
had improved its ‘prophylactic work’ but conceded that there was still much to be
done. Sticking to the traditional formula, it connected the growth in anti-Soviet
activity with an increase in imperialist intelligence work and stated that there were
only a few ‘anti-social elements’ who, under the influence of foreign propaganda,
were ‘continuing to try to use temporary hardships for their own ends’.
Links
between the KGB and militia were again described as ‘weak’ and it was
acknowledged that the security organs were not ‘mobilisationally prepared’ for major
disturbances such as Novocherkassk, conceding that they had struggled to influence
events once the disturbance was already under way. 277
The review then demanded that decisive measures were taken to strengthen the work
of the KGB against anti-Soviet elements. Surveillance of ‘suspicious types’ and
released prisoners was to be stepped up, the recruitment of informers and KGB agents
increased and specific training undertaken for future scenarios of mass disturbances in
built-up areas. To combat weaknesses in the placing and usage of undercover agents
it called for an increase in the availability of technological services for observation
purposes as well as improvements in the training and political education of agents. 278
276
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 20, ll. 1-16.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 20, ll. 1-6.
278
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 20, ll. 6-9.
277
234
Alongside the work of professional KGB employees there was a growing degree of
reliance upon information provided by informants and so-called ‘trusted people’
(doverennye litsa) throughout society. 279 Although collaboration with the security
organs was generally viewed by society at large as an ignoble endeavour, the
authorities proved skilful at creating a web of informers. As Shelley pointed out:
‘They (the KGB) offered powerful inducements to comply and severe punishments
for disobedience, few citizens of the USSR were capable of resisting the power of the
police’. 280
Owners of ground-floor flats located near the lobby telephone in apartment blocks
were expected to keep the security organs regularly informed about conversations that
they overheard. A promise of cooperation with the KGB was often a precondition for
jobs such as security guards and building commandants. Louise Shelley has even
estimated that the proportion of the population that co-operated with the security
police in some way was between thirty and sixty per cent. 281 As one can see, during
the Khrushchev era the regime’s machinery of social control was actually penetrating
deeper into the fabric of society than it ever had before. What this state of affairs
brings to mind is Michel Foucault’s assertion that ‘the controlled become the source
of their own control’. 282 As the middle of the 1960s approached, this new system of
social control was proving increasingly effective.
279
The distinction between the two was that the ‘trusted people’ were not formally linked with the
security organs to the same extent as other informers and agents. See Chebrikov, et al. Istoriya
sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti.
280
L. Shelley, Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 6.
281
Shelley, Policing Soviet Society, p. 119.
282
See M. Foucault and A. Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London, Penguin,
1991, p. 24.
235
The militia were not systematically involved in the day-to-day policing of dissent
during the Khrushchev years – a fact that was reversed under Brezhnev – though they
were obliged to assist the KGB in its work when requested to do so. This could
involve actions such as temporarily detaining citizens on trumped up charges,
carrying out unsanctioned apartment searches and conducting provocations against
specific individuals. One of their more important responsibilities was to register
typewriters, printing presses and photographic equipment; something that played an
important role in tracing the authors of samizdat documents, anonymous letters and
anti-Soviet leaflets. 283
4.1.3 CENTRALISATION
A theme that had not escaped the attention of the leadership was that of local officials’
inability to handle potentially volatile situations. Going right back to the post-Secret
Speech period, the authorities in Moscow had been unhappy with the way that
regional officials had ineptly responded to acts of protest and criticism. Similarly,
when Vladimir Semichastnyi’s deputy at the KGB, Ivashutin, submitted a report to
the Central Committee on the events at Novocherkassk, he placed much of the blame
on the shoulders of local officials and the NEVZ (Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive
Works) factory management and Party organisation for failing to address the growing
atmosphere of discontent and proving unable to keep the disturbances localised. 284
This reflected the extent to which the Soviet system continued to be one where the
willingness to take bold decisions was in particularly short supply in the provinces.
283
284
See Shelley, Policing Soviet Society, p. 65.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 6, d. 16, l. 2.
236
Whether this was a culture borne out of years of Stalinism, potentially dangerous
fluctuations at the top of the regime, ineptitude and conservatism on the part of
regional officials or genuinely restricted room for initiative at a local level is unclear.
Nonetheless, it does serve to highlight the fact that the system remained very much
inflexible and dependant on directions sent down ‘from above’.
The Procurator’s office in Moscow also seems to have tightened its control over the
work of provincial branches. While the period immediately following the Secret
Speech and December letter had seen numerous instances where regional offices had
botched or mishandled investigations, by the turn of the decade more stringent control
was being put into force by the centre. 285 This can be seen in the fact that case files
from the second half of the period more frequently include communications from the
centre to oblast’ procurators requesting more and more information on individual
cases in progress and sentences that were handed out.
The case file of Andrei Danilovich Mosin – arrested in Kursk in October 1962 after
sending two anonymous letters to the editor of Izvestiya – testifies to this trend. The
Kursk Procurator contacted the Procurator’s office in Moscow on 26 October to
inform that an arrest had been sanctioned and then contacted Moscow again on 16
November to inform that the investigation was complete and the case was about to
proceed to court. On 7 January 1963 the Moscow office asked Kursk to inform of the
trial’s outcome, which it did four days later – stating that Mosin had been sentenced to
seven years corrective labour. On 23 January Moscow then requested to be informed
of the content of Mosin’s letters and set a deadline of 1 February. On 2 February
285
On these flaws in the work of regional procurators see for example V. Kozlov and S. Mironenko
eds, Kramola: Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve 1953-1982, Moskva: ‘Materik’, 2005,
p. 32.
237
another letter was sent from Moscow demanding that the Kursk office speed up its
work and provide the requested information – which it eventually did so eleven days
later. 286
At a time when Khrushchev was attempting to implement a degree of decentralisation
in fields such as agriculture and industry, the opposite pattern can be witnessed with
regard to decision making on the subject of dissent. This was a trend that became
even more pronounced from the late 1960s, especially after the KGB’s Fifth
Department was established in 1967 for the specific purpose of combating dissent.
This indicated a realisation among the leadership that, since figures such as Sakharov
and Solzhenitsyn were famous the world over, the way that the regime reacted to such
prominent dissidents was no longer a strictly internal matter and could not be
entrusted to regional apparatchiks.
Under Khrushchev this centralisation of the
struggle against dissent was most likely indicative of the extent to which policies
against dissent were becoming increasingly planned and co-ordinated and the way that
law enforcement agencies were placing greater emphasis on professionalism –
something often lacking in the provinces.
Following the series of critical speeches that had occurred at Party meetings and
debates in the wake of the Secret Speech, it appears that plans were drawn up to deal
with this eventuality in the future. The best demonstration of this was provided by the
events that followed Petr Grigorenko’s speech at Moscow’s Lenin District Party
conference on 7 September 1961, mentioned in the previous chapter. After an attempt
to deprive Grigorenko of the floor in mid-speech was voted down, his remarks were
286
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 924020, ll. 1-11.
238
followed by an extended and unscheduled intermission, during which the heads of
delegations were assembled in a closed room and ordered to instruct their members to
condemn Grigorenko’s speech. When proceedings resumed a motion was put forward
that Grigorenko be deprived of his delegate’s credentials on the grounds of ‘political
immaturity’ and, despite the motion receiving the support of less than a third of the
delegates, it received no opposition and was passed accordingly. 287 Needless to say,
Grigorenko’s Party membership, like his military career, was very soon a thing of the
past. That nobody was willing to vote in Grigorenko’s defence was telling of the fact
that discipline had been thoroughly restored within the Party, yet the number of
people who refused to condemn his remarks also provided a commentary on the
extent to which fear had lessened since the Stalin years.
Interestingly, on the very same day Valentin Ovechkin had also delivered a critical
speech to a Party conference in Kursk that was dealt with in exactly the same way as
Grigorenko’s had been in Moscow. 288 Grigorenko claimed to have subsequently been
informed that this tactic had been specifically worked out in preparation for the XXII
Party Congress. 289 The fact that two such similar processes were put into action
against dissenting speeches in different parts of the country at the same time does
indeed offer persuasive evidence that the process had been prescribed in advance as a
means of combating critical remarks. Furthermore, after experiencing the period of
confusion and disunity within the Party ranks that had briefly arisen after
Khrushchev’s original exposure of Stalin, it would have been extremely remiss of the
287
P. Grigorenko, Memoirs, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1982, p. 250.
L. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. 271.
289
Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 250.
288
239
leadership not to have put some kind of plans into place for responding to dissenting
speeches before attacking Stalin again at the XXII CPSU Congress.
4.1.4 POLICING THE MAYAKOVSKY SQUARE MEETINGS
The authorities’ policing of the Mayakovsky Square poetry readings provides a useful
‘snapshot’ of their struggle against dissent at the time. The fact that those who
gathered at the Square were not immediately arrested, and indeed were never arrested
in most cases, tells us something about the way that the regime had changed since
even the early Khrushchev period. This showed that the policing of dissent in the
second half of the Khrushchev era was, in many ways, closer to that of the Brezhnev
years than it was to that of the late 1950s.
The authorities were keeping a very close eye on events at the Square. KGB agents
were furtively photographing attendees, carrying out searches for samizdat, trying to
provoke fights and summoning participants for individual ‘chats’. Expulsions from
universities and from the Komsomol soon followed. 290 The significance of this kind
of ‘black mark’ against a citizen ought not to be underestimated since it was liable to
stay on one’s permanent record and would ultimately close a lot of doors for the
respective individual throughout their entire life.
When this kind of pressure failed to keep people from attending the readings the next
step was liable to be more forceful. Bukovsky, for example, has written of an
occasion when he was accosted on his way home from the Square, bundled into a
290
See V. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978 and
L. Polikovskaya, ‘My predchuvstvie…predtecha’: ploshchad Mayakovskogo 1958-1965, Moskva:
Obshchestvo ‘Memorial’, 1997.
240
passing car and driven to an unknown location where he was beaten for several hours
before being warned that he would be killed if he went to the Square again. 291 The
assailants were, according to Bukovsky, members of the ‘Komsomol operative
detachments’ (Komsomol’skyi operativnyi otryady) that were used to carry out such
beatings. Louise Shelley has also written that these same Komsomol detachments
tended to conduct themselves violently when undertaking operations such as searches
for samizdat literature among students. 292
Although officially subordinate to the
militia and Komsomol, such groups were effectively employed to do the ‘dirty work’
that the KGB were no longer supposed to do themselves, according to Bukovsky. 293
This was broadly reflective of the way that dissent was policed not just under
Khrushchev but throughout much of the post-Stalin era. It is true to say that, on paper
at least, the Soviet regime was developing something like a ‘proper’ legal system yet
it remained one that could be, and was, repeatedly subverted by the authorities in their
efforts to combat dissent. 294
The fact that the events discussed above were all played out in the centre of Moscow
was not unimportant. In the capital city more than anywhere else, the regime had to
conduct itself with most restraint in responding to acts of dissent. The presence of
foreign journalists and tourists ensured that there was at least some degree of scrutiny
over the authorities’ behaviour. Increasingly mindful of international public opinion
for reasons already outlined, the authorities were more inclined to be seen to be
‘playing by the rules’ in the capital. Moscow also tended to be the city where the
most educated and best equipped KGB and militia operatives were to be found,
291
Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, p. 126.
Shelley, Policing Soviet Society, p. 113.
293
Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Cambridge, March 2007.
294
M. Lewin, The Soviet Century, London: Verso, 2005, p. 161.
292
241
meaning that there was less likelihood of a panicked and exaggerated response to acts
of protest and criticism. 295
Away from Moscow, responses to dissenting behaviour were likely to have been less
restrained by the new rules and regulations that had been brought in to prevent a
recurrence of the Stalin era’s systematic disregard for legality. Even many of the
Soviet Union’s second-ranked cities such as Kiev and Minsk were still out of bounds
to foreign journalists, enabling the authorities there to act against dissenters with
virtual impunity if they so wished. 296 In the more remote and rural regions of the
USSR the picture is less clear because evidence from these regions simply has not
come to light so far, yet there is no reason to suspect that provincial authorities were
any more lenient than elsewhere. Indeed, the likelihood is that they were harsher.
Details on one of the most interesting practicalities of policing dissent in the provinces
was provided in a report from Secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party, Putintsev, to
the Central Committee on 24 May 1960. Describing the discovery of over 450
leaflets in Aktyubinsk oblast’, written in the name of NTS, Putintsev reported that the
Party obkom had immediately mobilised 200 people to trace the leaflets in circulation.
These included local soldiers, Komsomol members, Party workers and KGB staff. 297
That the authorities had seen fit to devote so many people for this operation was
surely indicative of the extent to which such leaflets were seen to constitute a social
danger.
295
See Shelley, Policing Soviet Society, p. 86.
Although falling outside of the timeframe of the present work the best example of this trend can be
seen in official responses to the Soviet Helsinki Groups that were established outside of Moscow
during the late 1970s in Kiev, Tbilisi, Yerevan and Vilnius. Members of the Ukrainian group in
particular were subjected to numerous violent provocations, with many of them ultimately being
sentenced to long periods of corrective labour.
297
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 320, ll. 9-10.
296
242
In a more general sense the resources available for the policing of dissent appear to
have been practically limitless – again showing that the authorities took the threat
very seriously. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the case file of Mikhail Ermizin
– an assistant doctor (fel’dsher) from Stavropol who had posted tens of anti-Soviet
leaflets between 1962 and 1964 - demonstrated this.
The investigation protocol
reported that Ermizin had been traced by ‘graphic expertise’ and ‘forensic methods’
yet the most notable fact was that it listed 20 separate KGB specialists who had been
working on the investigation and a further two ‘scientific experts’. 298
The above case is demonstrative of the fact that not only were the authorities able and
willing to go to great lengths in order to trace and nullify such behaviour but they
were also determined to find the proper culprit. This is one of the main points to be
emphasised in regard to the way that dissent was policed under Khrushchev. Those
who had not transgressed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were no longer at
risk of facing the authorities’ wrath. Those who had engaged in some form of
proscribed behaviour were liable to be faced with the full power of the state. By the
1960s this did not always mean imprisonment, however.
4.2 PROPHYLAXIS
The lessons of the Hungarian rising had shown that dissent could not be allowed to go
unchecked, yet jailing all those who criticised some aspect of the regime was simply
not a feasible option for the authorities. The Supreme Court resolution of June 1958,
which censured the inappropriate use of article 58-10 in cases where individuals were
not ‘truly anti-Soviet’, further expedited the need for a more viable long-term means
298
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 97853, ll. 10-14.
243
of managing protest and criticism within society. A little over six months later, at the
XXI CPSU Congress in January 1959, Khrushchev announced that prophylactic
measures (profilaktika) were to become the main feature of what he referred to as the
state’s ‘educational work’ (vospitatel’naya rabota). 299
The semantic imagery of dissent as some kind of unhealthy phenomenon from which
society had to be protected is immediately apparent but the precise meaning of the
term ‘prophylactic measures’ is less clear. It was, as Julie Elkner has stated, ‘a much
used but only vaguely defined term’. 300
Vasily Mitrokhin’s guide to KGB
terminology defined profilaktika in the following way: ‘Activity carried out by Soviet
state bodies and social organisations aimed at the prevention of crimes against the
state, politically harmful misdemeanours and other acts which affect the interests of
the state security of the USSR’. 301 Whereas previously the state had focused its
energies upon punishing dissent, now it was also striving to prevent acts of protest and
criticism from arising in the first place. The reason that the authorities no longer
chose to jail critics as they had done previously was not necessarily because the
regime had become more liberal but because it had begun to take a more rational
approach to social control.
What Mitrokhin’s definition illustrates is that profilaktika was an umbrella term which
incorporated a range of measures aimed at policing dissenting behaviour without
recourse to labour camps and prisons, demonstrating that the Manichean nature of the
299
See E. Papovyan and A. Papovyan, ‘Uchastie verkhovnogo suda SSSR v vyrabotke repressivnoi
politiki, 1957-1958’, in L. Eremina and E. Zhemkova, eds. Korni Travy: Sbornik statei molodykh
istorikov, Moskva: Zven’ya, 1996, pp. 54-73.
300
See J. Elkner, ‘The Changing Face of Repression in the Khrushchev Era’ in M. Ilic and J. Smith eds,
State and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev, London: Routledge, Forthcoming (2009).
301
V. Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon: The Soviet Intelligence Officer’s Handbook, London: Frank Cass,
2002, p. 329.
244
Soviet regime had softened somewhat in regard to who was considered an ‘enemy’.
Furthermore, it showed that the authorities were becoming increasingly proactive in
fighting dissent: a reflection of the fact that the uncertainty and near-panic of the early
post-Stalin years was fading away. Social control was becoming more rational and,
owing to the fact that far fewer people were being jailed as a result of this
rationalisation, more humanitarian.
One can distinguish two separate forms of prophylaxis: the first aimed at minimising
protest and criticism throughout society as a whole by educational means (glasnaya
profilaktika) and the second which employed measures against specific individuals
who were perceived to be insufficiently compliant or in some way unreliable
(chastnaya profilaktika). When combined, these two levels of prophylaxis provided a
highly effective inter-locking mechanism of social control that played a major role in
maintaining society’s outward passivity for almost three decades.
4.2.1 MEDIA ATTACKS ON DISSENTERS
One of the key facets of the authorities’ attempts to forestall dissenting behaviour
across Soviet society as a whole lay in the studying and shaping of public moods. The
former made the regime better able to head off potentially imminent unrest and the
latter provided a more enduring foundation for stifling dissent in the long term.
Professional study of public opinion had officially begun in 1959 and the Institute of
Public Opinion was established at Komsomolskaya pravda in 1960. 302 The fact that a
302
The Institute of Public Opinion was subsequently closed down at the end of 1967, apparently
because it continually told the highest authorities news that they did not want to hear. Both Firsov and
Grushin worked at the Institute of Public Opinion. See B. Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR 1940-1960 gody:
Istoriya, teoriya i praktika, Sankt Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt Peterburge,
245
newspaper aimed at young people had been chosen as the base for this new institute
was probably no coincidence.
It demonstrated that the regime continued to be
concerned by the apparent disengagement of the younger generation from the goals
and principles of the Soviet regime.
Among the authorities’ main propaganda targets in the late Khrushchev era were
citizens who dared to voice positive views of the West: often this meant young
people.
However, the authorities were no longer attempting to portray living
standards in the West as worse than those in the USSR – a myth that had already been
comprehensively exploded by the end of the 1950s – but were essentially trying to
stop people from saying in public what they thought in private. In other words, they
were trying to ‘manage’ dissent rather than to eradicate it.
An example of this could be seen by a September 1963 article in Kazakhstanskaya
pravda entitled ‘From an Alien Voice’ in which two miners from Leninogorsk were
attacked for ‘lavishing praise upon life in America at every opportune moment’ and
‘being unashamed to slander their homeland’. 303 A similar case was played out in the
Georgian newspaper Zarya vostoka during November of the same year. The article,
entitled ‘A Bark behind the Gate’, attacked citizens who listened to foreign radio
stations and spread anti-Soviet literature ‘with a foreign voice’.
The author’s
conclusion was succinct and emotive: ‘we have no right to be indifferent’. 304
2008 and B. Grushin Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo meneniya: Epokha
Khrushcheva, Moskva: Progress-Traditsiya, 2001.
303
Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, 27 September 1963.
304
Zarya Vostoka, 13 November 1963.
246
Media excoriation was not restricted to those who praised the West, however. A
notable drive against public criticism began in March 1964 when Izvestiya published a
letter, purporting to be from a Magadan miner named Nikolai Kuritsyn, entitled ‘This
Must Be Fought!’ After allegedly overhearing two young people mocking that year’s
poor harvest while waiting in line at a bank, Kuritsyn wrote to Izvestiya describing
such people as ‘toadstools’ and insisting that the Soviet way of life must be defended.
His comments on how to respond to such individuals were as follows: ‘…we cannot
act like our woodcutter acted, passing himself off as a gardener for 30 years.
However, we must fight them, disgrace them, shame them, unmask them in front of
honest people’. 305
Subsequent research by Radio Liberty claimed that Kuritsyn was in fact not a miner,
as his letter had claimed, but a journalist. 306
Assuming that the allegation was
accurate, this serves to flag up the point that the Soviet media remained very much an
integral tool in the authorities’ efforts to mobilise public opinion. The disavowal of
Stalin (‘the woodcutter’) was central to the letter’s message: we are not reverting to
the ‘bad old days’ but criticism of the system will still not be tolerated. Additionally,
the fact that only one instance of young people ‘praising the West’ had been raised
was probably intended to give the impression that this was not a wider trend that was
sweeping the country. The fact that this issue was raised in such a high-circulation
newspaper as Izvestiya may suggest that this was not the case, however.
Kuritsyn’s rallying call was heard and numerous letters in support of his remarks were
duly printed in Izvestiya later that month attacking ‘rumour-spreaders’ and those who
305
306
Izvestiya, 1 March 1964.
Radio Liberty Monitoring report, March 6, 1964, HU OSA, 300-80-01, Box 44.
247
told anti-Soviet anecdotes. These letters included comments such as ‘It becomes
offensive to the point of pain when you hear base, rotten anecdotes from the mouths
of some young people’ and ‘…just some difficulty, some troubles in our huge
economy and they are already buzzing like nasty autumnal flies’. 307 In fact, the
language and imagery employed in this last letter were reminiscent of that which had
recently been used by Khrushchev himself when he chastised a March 1963 gathering
of the cultural intelligentsia, warning that the growth in literature on ‘the camp theme’
that had taken place since the publication of Ivan Denisovich was liable to ‘provide
ammunition for our enemies, and huge, fat flies will fall on such materials like
dung’. 308
Probably the best example of this general whipping up of ill-feeling against dissenters
could be seen in the February 1964 edition of Trud where it was said of the
‘anonymous calumniator’ G.R. Levitin (who had apparently written a series of
anonymous and hostile letters to Trud, though the content of these letters was never
made clear): ‘…he poured dirt on Soviet reality and blackened the state which gave
him an education, a well-built home and guaranteed him a pension’, it then accused
him of attempting to extort and threaten several of his own friends and concluded that
‘the anonymous calumniator is not only abominable but he is also dangerous. Here is
an evil which we must not tolerate’.309 One can immediately see that Levitin was not
being attacked on ideological grounds but as someone of dubious morality.
307
Research Notes on Soviet Affairs, March 13, 1964, HU OSA, 300-80-1, Box 44.
Khrushchev’s warning came as he stated that, in the wake of Ivan Denisovich, publishing houses
were ‘being flooded with manuscripts about camps and prisons. See M. Scammell, ed. The
Solzhenitsyn Files, Chicago: Edition Q inc, 1995, p. 3.
309
Trud, 25 February 1964.
308
248
Over the course of the following year such articles, editorials and letters cropped up in
the media with some regularity. A Radio Liberty analysis of developments in the
Soviet media, written in May 1964, showed that in February and March of that year
alone the newspapers Izvestiya, Trud and Komsomolskaya Pravda printed one or more
articles on issues including anonymous letters, the telling of anti-Soviet jokes,
spreading anti-Soviet rumours and public discussion of ‘thorny problems’. 310 These
were all newspapers with large circulation figures, particularly Izvestiya, which
carried four separate stories relating to dissent in this two-month period, meaning that
their message would surely not go unheard among the population. However, this was
clearly not a massive campaign – indicating that such behaviour was probably not
seen by the authorities as an urgent problem at this stage.
The aim of such letters and articles was essentially to intimidate rather than to
persuade. For the most part no arguments were put forward or official positions
explained other than the simple message that criticism would not be tolerated.
Referring back to the attack on G.R. Levitin in Trud, it is noteworthy that the content
of his letters was not even discussed in the article. Presumably, the authorities were
not willing to take the risk that Levitin’s criticism would resonate among the
population as Yuri Orlov’s had back in 1956, and thus denied his remarks ‘the oxygen
of publicity’.
That this attempt to silence critics was conveyed through newspaper articles,
editorials and letters purporting to be from the public, suggests that the aim was to
manufacture public opinion rather than simply to dictate how people should behave.
310
Radio Liberty Analysis of Current Developments in the Soviet Union, HU OSA 300-80-1, Box 632.
249
This was perhaps another indication that the authorities, or at least the experts at the
Institute of Public Opinion, were aware of the declining faith in the regime’s
pronouncements. It is also important not to overlook the point that under Stalin, and
even at times under Khrushchev, instances of citizens ‘lavishing praise’ upon foreign
powers would most likely have led to a lengthy spell in a corrective labour camp
instead of scathing press coverage.
One notable factor in the newspaper attacks on dissenters was the change of discourse
on dissent. The media had begun to take a more subtle approach to tackling the
subject and abandoned its previous tone of ideological outrage that had been
employed in Izvestiya’s accusation that Yuri Orlov and his colleagues had been guilty
of ‘singing Menshevik songs’, for example. Instead, newspapers employed language
intended to invoke hostility against dissenters by way of patriotic, moral or material
grounds. This most likely showed the authorities were aware that ideological rhetoric
was no longer capable of arousing a sufficiently passionate response throughout
society but patriotism remained strong among Russians at least, while moral values
and material concerns were still important to the everyday lives of most people.
As Shlapentokh has argued, aside from the idealised picture of society that was
presented for public consumption, the Soviet leadership did actually hold a more
practical and realistic image of society too and it was this that they acted upon. The
authorities knew that consumer goods and family welfare were becoming more
250
important to citizens than building a communist utopia. 311 Attacking dissenters on
moral and material grounds was a clear indication of this.
The theme of appealing to citizens’ patriotism is one that can be seen at work in
regard to propaganda against the foreign broadcasts being beamed into the USSR.
Soviet media attacks on the Munich-based Radio Liberty regularly saw its Soviet
émigré staff branded ‘fascist riff-raff’ and ‘Vlasovites’ – a label that Gene Sosin
conceded was not entirely inaccurate. 312 In regard to the kind of Chinese anti-Soviet
agitation that was discussed in the previous chapter, the authorities employed equally
bellicose rhetoric, at one stage suggesting in Izvestiya that the Chinese regime was
comparable to that of Hitler, Napoleon or Genghis Khan. 313 The intention of such
remarks to stir up some kind of patriotic fervour as a means of combating dissent was
entirely evident. To what extent this would have resounded among the USSR’s nonRussian population is less clear, though it seems unlikely that the Mongol conquest of
ancient Rus and the battle of Borodino would have roused a great deal of passion in
Riga, Vilnius or Tallinn, for example.
It is hard to say with any great certainty just how successful the authorities were at
shaping public opinion in this way.
In particular it is worth remembering the
arguments that have been raised at several points throughout this thesis in regard to
the growing level of cynicism with which many members of society regarded official
pronouncements: many Soviet citizens had already become skilled at ‘reading
311
See V. Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin
Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 18.
312
Sosin, Sparks of Liberty, p. 71. General Andrei Vlasov had been at the head of the Committee for
the Liberation of the People’s of Russia – an army of Soviet prisoners of war that had changed sides to
fight against the Soviet regime during the Second World War.
313
Izvestiya, 22 August 1963.
251
between the lines’ when it came to the media. However, it does seem that by the end
of the period this new approach had left some impact on public attitudes. It is
instructive in this case to cite Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s recollections of people’s stance
in regard to dissenters during the Brezhnev era: ‘A Soviet dissident quickly became a
pariah even among those who privately shared his views’ and ‘Isolated from society,
we lived in what amounted to a ghetto’. 314 This stands in stark contrast with the
earlier experiences of Yuri Orlov and Petr Grigorenko, both of whom felt that their
social standing not only did not suffer but actually improved after their respective
criticisms of the authorities. 315
4.2.2 THE ROLE OF SOCIETY
This did not necessarily indicate that ordinary members of society became personally
opposed to dissenters per se, but that they at least considered it too dangerous to
associate with them. This in itself can be regarded as a success for the authorities.
After all, they were not trying to counter the criticisms that were made by dissenters
but were attempting to neutralise the impact that they had upon society. The regime’s
disfavour did not have to be viewed as legitimate for it to be acknowledged and acted
upon. However, in the long term this arguably gave prominent victims of state
persecution, such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, considerable moral authority among
elements of the population, according to Robert Horvath. 316
314
L. Alexeyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era,
Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1990, p. 244.
315
Interview with Yuri Orlov, Ithaca, December 2006 and interview with Andrei Grigorenko, New
York, October 2006.
316
This is an important theme of Robert Horvath’s work on the role of dissidents in the fall of the
Soviet Union and the subsequent emergence of the Russian Federation. See R. Horvath The Legacy of
Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia, London: Routledge,
2005.
252
Pressure to conform did not come solely from above but was also embedded in the
very fabric of life in the USSR. The Khrushchev regime was even more invasive into
citizens’ everyday lives than Stalin’s had been and nowhere was this aspect of social
control more evident than in the form of the kollektiv (collective). This was the basic
unit of Soviet society and all citizens were automatically members of several
collectives, in workplaces, housing blocks, recreational societies and elsewhere. 317
Members of any given collective were increasingly expected to take an active interest
in the ideological lives of their fellow members; as Elena Zubkova has argued,
‘personal life was considered a public matter’. 318
By placing a degree of
responsibility on the collective as a whole for the actions of its individual members,
an unseen but powerful deterrent was added to prevent undesirable behaviour. Being
‘against the collective’ remained one of the most serious accusations that could be
levelled at a Soviet citizen. 319
Agitators also played an important role in this process of maintaining conformity.
The KGB’s internal history textbook stated that one of its main domestic tasks around
this time involved holding agitation sessions with workers, peasants and the
intelligentsia and ‘warning them of the danger posed by Western propaganda’. 320
These sessions could also entail discussing cases of a specific individual’s
misbehaviour at Party, Komsomol or trade union meetings with the aim of shaming
317
See O. Kharkhodin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices, London:
University of California Press, 1999, p. 75.
318
E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945-1964, Moskva: Izdatel’skii tsentr ‘Rossiya molodaya’,
1993, p. 121.
319
Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life, p. 131.
320
Chebrikov, et al. Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, p. 503.
253
them into conformity. 321 Agitators were apparently also expected to keep detailed
records of questions that they were asked at their sessions that were then passed on to
the Party hierarchy and used as a kind of barometer for public opinion – an example
of which has already been cited in chapter 1.322
However, outside of the major cities these agitators were often poorly trained and
largely ineffective. Anatoly Marchenko’s account of compulsory Political Instruction
Sessions that took place in labour camps shows that agitational work there was often
particularly inept and effectively little more than a token gesture. 323 In all likelihood
this did not indicate that the authorities were any less concerned about the threat of
dissent in the provinces but instead reflected the regime’s long-standing inability to
get ‘good people’ to work and live outside of the major cities.
4.2.3 PREVENTING FUTURE UPRISINGS
From 1962 onwards the regime took a growing interest in gauging public moods – an
implicit acknowledgment of the fact that they had been genuinely rocked by the
disorders that took place at Novocherkassk and elsewhere.
This was entirely
understandable since no regime could be expected to survive repeated disturbances
and disquiet on the scale of that which arose during the summer of 1962. The
message that these events had sent to the authorities was clear: another major swelling
of popular discontent had the potential to pose a very real threat to the stability of the
regime. With their determination to maintain social passivity at practically any cost,
this was a message that the authorities could not ignore.
321
Mitrokhin, KGB Lexicon, p. 188.
A. Inkeles, Social Change in Soviet Russia, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 276.
323
See A. Marchenko, My Testimony, London: Pall Mall Press, 1969, p. 239.
322
254
The desire to avoid a re-run of the Novocherkassk disaster was palpable. An example
of this can be seen in the way that a potentially dangerous situation was averted in
Pskov the following year. Radio Liberty monitoring reports recorded that, following
the poor harvest in 1963 the town had suffered prolonged bread shortages which led
to widespread discontent and a series of strikes were planned to take place during
October. On being informed of the situation there the leadership in Moscow moved
quickly and decisively to snuff out the danger. They immediately ordered the release
of flour held in strategic reserves elsewhere around the country and had it sent directly
to Pskov in order to placate the population there. The monitoring report’s conclusion
that ‘the local authorities would probably have let matters get out of hand and produce
another Novocherkassk’ most likely reflected the judgement of the leadership. 324
An article published in the Washington Evening Star in November of the same year
offered further evidence on the same theme when it reported that there were strong
rumours of unrest in the Russian countryside and stated that the remarks of the
leadership had been ‘unusually conciliatory recently’. It went on to say that Soviet
radio stations had been dedicating a great deal of time to addressing listeners’
complaints in recent weeks and that the government had made it known that
overcoming these ‘temporary shortages’ was a top priority. 325 How far one can put
faith in Western media reports about the Soviet domestic situation is open to debate,
though this particular scenario does fit into the government’s general pattern of
behaviour at this time.
324
325
HU OSA, 300-80-1, Box 180.
Washington Evening Star, 12 November 1963.
255
With bread queues forming even in the Ukraine – long regarded as the ‘bread basket’
of the Soviet Union – Khrushchev opted to import grain from abroad for the very first
time rather than risk another series of domestic uprisings. The opprobrium that
dissenters heaped upon Khrushchev as a result of this move has already been
described. That such a humiliating step was taken, both for Khrushchev personally
and for the regime as a whole, ultimately demonstrated just how much the regime had
begun to understand that social stability was contingent on the provision of a
generally acceptable standard of living.
Analysing 570 occasions of public unrest during the Soviet period, evidence presented
in a study by Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Valery Chalidze supports this assessment.
They showed that between the 1960s and 1980s the number of people involved in
large civic disturbances had dropped consistently and concluded that this could be
attributed to ‘…the stabilization of power and improvements in the methods of
averting confrontations’, and specifically cited the stability of food prices as an
example of this. 326
4.2.4 THE PROPHYLACTIC CHAT
The central feature of profilaktika as it touched upon the lives of individual Soviet
citizens was the ‘prophylactic chat’ (profilakticheskaya beseda). What this usually
involved was for individuals who were considered to be ideologically wayward or
potentially troublesome, but not implacably hostile toward Soviet the regime, to be
summoned to their local KGB offices for a ‘chat’. Unfortunately, no records have yet
326
L. Alexeyeva and V. Chalidze, Mass Unrest in the USSR. Vol. 2, Washington DC: Office of Net
Assessments, 1985.
256
been uncovered on how this new practice came to be added to the corpus of policy
against dissent but, judging from their growing influence on policy formulation in this
sphere, it is probably safe to assume that the security organs were the driving force
behind the adoption of the ‘prophylactic chat’.
During the course of their meeting with the KGB, the person in question was usually
bullied and cajoled into admitting and then renouncing any kind of dissenting activity.
It was made clear that they were being watched by the security organs and that a
resumption of ‘undesirable behaviour’ could have serious consequences such as the
loss of one’s job, refusal of a university place to one’s children or the threat of
imprisonment for either the interviewee or friends and family members. For the
solitary individual to be brought face to face with the coercive power of the state in
this way must have been particularly unnerving, especially considering the security
organs’ brutal past only a few years previously.
This selective application of
intimidation stood in great contrast with the mass repression of the Stalin years.
The criteria for what kinds of cases were resolved by the use of these prophylactic
chats was broadly predictable but never entirely consistent. In many cases this would
involve people who had played a relatively minor role in any particular act of dissent,
whose names had come up in connection with an ongoing investigation or whom
KGB agents and informants had picked out as being in some way politically
unreliable. Those who were considered misguided dissenters – often this referred to
young people apparently under the influence of harmful foreign propaganda –
received this response, as did those who were not judged to be ‘genuinely antiSoviet’. However, this is not to say that all those who were jailed for dissenting
257
activity since the introduction of prophylaxis were hardened opponents of the regime
since inconsistencies still remained in the way that these prophylactic measures were
applied.
Most likely, this element of inconsistency was in itself a part of the authorities’
strategy, meaning that any given act of protest and criticism could theoretically still
end with imprisonment rather than prophylaxis, thus preventing an individual from
being able to ‘go right up to the line without crossing it’. It may also be that the
authorities themselves had no fixed criteria on the matter but instead worked on a
case-by-case basis in evaluating individuals’ attitudes toward the regime before
deciding whether they were genuine enemies or simply misguided and, importantly,
whether a warning would prevent further dissenting activity. This would involve
assessing evidence such as individuals’ work records and details of any previous
clashes with the authorities. By no means could one call this the foundation of a
perfect or sophisticated legal system, yet it was clearly a massive improvement on the
Stalin years.
Exactly how many of these ‘prophylactic chats’ were undertaken by the KGB is hard
to say because only a limited amount of data has been made available. 327
Nonetheless, there are sufficient scraps of evidence to show that this became by far
the most common form of official response to breaches of political norms from the
early 1960s onwards. A KGB report to the Central Committee from 25 July 1962
stated that in the first half of that year 105 people had been sentenced for preparation
and distribution of anti-Soviet documents, while a further 568 had been subjected to
327
The majority of the relevant information is held in the archives of the KGB and in the Presidential
Archive of the Russian Federation. The latter was briefly opened up to a number of researchers during
the early 1990s but both are now closed.
258
prophylactic measures. 328 An analogous report sent a little under two years later said
that of the 385 authors of anti-Soviet documents uncovered in the first five months of
1964, 39 had been jailed while 225 had been subjected to prophylactic measures. 329
The above figures would, therefore, suggest that the ratio of prophylaxis to
imprisonment was approximately 5:1.
Evidently, the regime had come to accept that camps and prisons were not always the
most appropriate or effective means of response, especially since political prisons
were becoming ‘schools of revolution’ according to Kozlov. 330 The authorities had
clearly also begun to see that even some of the regime’s sharpest critics were not
entirely beyond salvation. One case, albeit a rather extreme one, that was uncovered
in Voronezh oblast’ during July 1963 saw a self-styled fascist youth group that had
managed to acquire various explosives and a machine gun, spared jail after they were
uncovered by the KGB. The four members of the ‘National Socialist Party’, along
with their parents, were subjected only to a series of prophylactic chats instead of
imprisonment. 331
Another example can be seen in the case against Yuri Grimm and Abdulbai
Khasyanov, the authors of a series of anti-Soviet leaflets discussed in the previous
chapter. The investigation protocol named a further nine accomplices who had helped
the pair to distribute the leaflets around Moscow but who, unlike Grimm and
Khasyanov, were not jailed. 332 What cases such as those above demonstrate is that if
328
RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 1, ll. 1-4.
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, l. 110. The remaining 121 cases were still in process at the time the
report was written.
330
Kozlov and Mironenko eds, Kramola, p. 54.
331
RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, ll. 50-51.
332
RGANI, f. 8131, op. 33, d. 96712, ll. 1-33.
329
259
and when detailed KGB records pertaining to the application of individual
prophylactic measures become available, historians may well see that the volume, and
perhaps also the intensity, of dissenting behaviour across the USSR was several times
greater during the post-Stalin era than has been supposed.
The contrast with the repressive activity of the Stalin years was particularly sharp and
highlights the extent to which serious changes had been enacted under Khrushchev.
One ought to be wary of seeing this solely as a reflection of greater liberality during
the Khrushchev years, however.
There were, after all, various benefits for the
authorities in adopting this new course. While Stalin’s Gulag and massive arbitrary
terror had done untold damage to the fabric of society and the regime, prophylaxis
was a practice that came at little economic, demographic or political cost.
Furthermore it avoided the kind of large-scale antagonism of society and international
opprobrium that mass imprisonment would have incurred and which the authorities
were desperate to avoid.
Most importantly, it appears that these individual prophylactic sessions were highly
effective at stifling dissent. The KGB’s account of the period stated that ‘the majority
of those subjected to prophylactic measures did not offend again. 333 That the practice
was not only continued but also significantly expanded under the subsequent
Brezhnev regime can be seen as further testimony of this fact. 334 Had prophylaxis not
333
Chebrikov et al. Istoriya sovetskikh organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, p. 564.
Rudolf Pikhoya has cited figures from the Presidential Archive which show that for the period of
1967 to 1970 there were 58,291 cases where prophylactic measures were applied and between 1971
and 1974 the figure rose further to 63,108. When one compares these figures to the number of
sentences under political articles of the criminal codes, the ratio between imprisonment and prophylaxis
rises to approximately 1:100. Figures on prophylaxis taken from R. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: Istoriya
vlasti, 1945-1991, Moskva: Rossisskaya akademiya gos. sluzhby pri Prezidente Rossiisskoi Federatsii
1998, p. 277.
334
260
been effective in keeping dissent at manageable levels around the country it seems
likely that the authorities would have had no option but to revert to a more aggressive
means of maintaining domestic stability – as was the case with those hardcore
dissenters who refused to be silenced by these attempts at intimidation.
4.3 CAMPS AND PRISONS
As F.J. Feldbrugge pointed out in a 1963 article reviewing Soviet legal developments:
‘The social straggler is invited to rejoin the ranks immediately, and if he cannot or
will not do so, he is annihilated’. 335 Feldbrugge’s assessment may have been a little
hyperbolic but its message was not misleading. Even though the authorities were
showing an increasing tendency to resist employing custodial sentences against
dissenters, the number of people jailed for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda
during the early 1960s was far from insignificant. Over 1,200 individuals were
sentenced for anti-Soviet activity between the turn of the decade and Khrushchev’s
ouster – a figure that still exceeded that of any comparable period during the
Brezhnev years. 336
4.3.1 THE LEGAL SYSTEM
The Soviet legal system underwent a period of significant development after Stalin’s
death as the promise of ‘strengthening socialist legality’ was offered as a guarantee
335
F. Feldbrugge, ‘Soviet Criminal Law. The Last Six Years’, The Journal of Criminal Law,
Criminology, and Police Science, Vol. 54, No. 3, September 1963, p. 263.
336
Istochnik, 1995, No.6, p. 153.
261
that there would be no return to the abuses of the recent past. 337 Many of the key
changes that took place in this respect – such as the diminution of the security organs’
power, the end of state reliance on Gulag labour and the curtailment of entirely
groundless repression had actually begun soon after Stalin’s death, during the period
of collective leadership. However, the regime was still operating on the basis of a
criminal code that had been enacted during the 1920s, when the Soviet Union was a
very different place. 338
The first significant change to the Soviet legal system came when a new ‘Law on
State Crimes’ was published at the end of December 1958. 339 Combined with the
introduction of prophylaxis at around the same time, this clearly marked a new stage
in the regime’s responses to dissenting behaviour. 340
A key point of the new
principles as they related to dissenters was that they abolished the legal classification
of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’, and thus also the notorious article 58-10. There
were numerous reasons why the regime might have chosen to abolish the concept of
‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. These included an attempt to emphasise the break
with the illegalities of the Stalin era and to reduce the degree of arbitrariness that the
vague concept of ‘counter-revolutionary’ had entailed. 341
337
For the best coverage of developments within the Soviet law enforcement apparatus see A.
Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaya ‘ottepel’’ Moskva: Olma Press, 2002 and Lewin, The Soviet Century
338
The criminal code referred to here is that of the RSFSR which was promulgated in 1926. Each
union republic had its own criminal code yet in practice they differed very little from that of Russia.
339
Those crimes that were defined as ‘anti-state’ fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government
rather than that of individual union republics.
340
The ‘Law on State Crimes’ came as part of a package of reforms concerned with the general
principles of criminal law and criminal procedure at a federal level and included the ‘Basic Principles
on Criminal Legislation’, the ‘Basic Law on Criminal Procedure in the USSR’ and the ‘Law on
Military Crimes’.
341
See P. Taylor, ‘Treason, Espionage and Other Soviet State Crimes’, Russian Review, Vol.23, No.3,
July 1964, pp. 247-258.
262
In place of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ the new law featured the classification of
‘crimes against the state’ and ‘especially dangerous crimes against the state’. 342
However, this change appears to have been something of a semantic slight-of-hand.
In place of article 58-10 came articles 70 and 72; the former dealt with ‘anti-Soviet
agitation and propaganda’ and the latter with ‘activity by organised groups leading to
especially dangerous crimes against the state and participation in anti-Soviet
organisations’. In practice there was virtually no difference in the kinds of behaviour
that the new principles saw dissenters jailed for.
Critical leaflets, letters and
underground groups all remained a potential trigger for arrest and imprisonment. 343
The principles that had been laid out in the ‘Law on State Crimes’ were subsequently
included in the new criminal codes of each union republic that were enacted during
1960 and 1961. Moshe Lewin has suggested that this overhaul of the legal system can
be seen as an attempt to create a ‘proper justice system’ that was the product of
extensive professional discussion and subjected to rigorous drafting and redrafting. 344
However, the Soviet concept of justice continued to be centred upon the ideals and
aims of the CPSU and although the authorities had begun to make a more convincing
pretence at operating within these new laws, they could always be bent to the Party’s
will when necessary. It is worth restating that despite major improvements, the law
enforcement apparatus and judiciary were very much under the sway of the Party. In
this light, an alternative assessment of the post-Stalin legal system has been provided
342
The difference between ‘ordinary’ crimes against the state and ‘especially dangerous’ crimes against
the state was defined as being the presence of anti-Soviet intent. Thus, for example, sabotage or fraud
would generally be regarded as ‘ordinary’ crimes against the state but if anti-Soviet intent were proven
they would then be tried as ‘especially dangerous’ crimes against the state.
343
It is also notable that the almost-definitive anthology of people imprisoned under article 58-10 in the
post-Stalin era also includes those jailed under articles 70 and 72 after the changes of December 1958.
See V. Kozlov, and S. Mironenko, eds. 58-10 Nadzornye proizvodstva prokuratury SSSR po delam ob
antisovetskoi agitatsii i propaganda: annotirovannyi katalog Mart 1953 – 1991, Moskva:
Mezhdunarodnyi Fond ‘Demokratiya’, 1999.
344
Lewin, The Soviet Century, p. 161.
263
by Louise Shelley: ‘commitment to the rule of law, intrinsic to democratic policing,
was conspicuously absent from the Khrushchev reforms’. 345
One of the general trends that was witnessed across numerous articles of the new
criminal codes, including those dealing with anti-Soviet activity, was a lowering of
the maximum penalties prescribed for those who were convicted. In the case of antiSoviet agitation and propaganda this meant a reduction from a maximum sentence of
twenty five years imprisonment down to ten years imprisonment with an additional
five years of internal exile. Nonetheless, it is instructive to refer back to Procurator
statistics cited in chapter two which show that even prior to the new code’s
promulgation the average sentence under article 58-10 had been approximately five
years in length. 346 As such this can be seen as a codification of existing practice
rather than a liberalising measure in its own right.
Among the most interesting aspects of the way in which sentences for anti-Soviet
activity were handed down during the first half of the 1960s is that of regional
distribution. For example, when taken together the citizens of the USSR’s Central
Asian
republics
(Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan,
Tadzhikistan
and
Kyrgyzstan) made up almost 11 per cent of the overall Soviet population yet
accounted for a combined total of less than 1 per cent of all political sentences. 347
Between 1960 and 1964 these five republics witness only seven sentences for antiSoviet activity between them – a considerably lower number than individual republics
345
Shelley, Policing Soviet Society, p. 45.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 5080, l. 7.
347
Population data on this subject is taken from the 1959 census. See Tsentral’noe statisticheskoe
upravlenie pri Sovete Ministrove SSSR, Chislennost’, sostav i razmeshchenie naseleniya SSSR: kratkie
itogi Vsesoyuznoi perepisi naseleniya 1959 goda, Moskva, 1959, p. 3-8. Data on the nationality of
those sentenced for anti-Soviet activity has been taken from the files of the USSR Procurator. See
Kozlov and Mironenko eds, 58-10 Nadzornye proizvodstva prokuratury SSSR, p. 1-662.
346
264
such as Belarus (17 political sentences), Georgia (11 sentences) and Armenia (8
sentences).
There were numerous socio-cultural reasons why the republics of Central Asia would
have produced a disproportionately low number of dissenters – such as generally
lower education levels and fewer major industrial centres – yet it also seems that there
were growing regional differences in policing too. This is particularly evident when
one considers that chapter 2 showed the distribution of sentences during the campaign
of 1957-1958 to have been roughly proportionate throughout the USSR. Already the
Brezhnev era trend of local elites running these republics as personal fiefdoms had
begun to take hold and there was consequently little desire to arouse Moscow’s
interest in their internal affairs – something that political arrests and trials would have
been sure to do. 348 Instead, one would most likely have seen a tendency to deal with
any outbursts of protest and criticism ‘in house’ as far as possible. Furthermore, these
were most liable to be the parts of the USSR where there would be the lowest
concentration of law enforcement agents and fewest resources for combating protest
and criticism – meaning that anonymous acts of dissent in those areas would probably
be more likely to go undetected.
Cases of groundless repression were far rarer than in the Stalin years but for those
who were jailed the situation in labour camps and prisons remained particularly harsh.
One need only read through Anatoly Marchenko’s My Testimony or the relevant
sections of Gulag Archipelago to see that any notion of liberalisation in this sphere of
348
For example, in the Uzbek SSR Sharof Rashidov ruled between 1959 and 1983. In the Kirgiz SSR
Turdakun Usubaliev was first secretary from 1961 to 1985 and in the Tadzhik SSR Dzhabar Rasulov
was head of the Communist Party between 1961 and 1982.
265
Soviet life was strictly relative to what had gone before. 349 While the immediate
period following Stalin’s death was described by Solzhenitsyn as ‘the mildest three
years in the history of the archipelago’, in later years conditions had deteriorated to
the point where the same author could write that the difference between the camps of
the Khrushchev period and those of the Stalin period lay in their composition rather
than their regime. 350
4.3.2 DETERIORATING CONDITIONS
Many of the Stalin era camp officials who had been dismissed in the early
Khrushchev years now began to return to their former positions as the camp system of
the Brezhnev era was fundamentally established more than two years prior to
Khrushchev’s removal from office. The ratio of dissenters who were convicted for
anti-Soviet activity may have been dropping markedly but the situation for those who
were jailed for political crimes actually worsened.
Numerous sources on the
Khrushchev-era camps have pointed to 1961-1962 as having witnessed a noticeable
tightening up of camp regimes. 351
This turn for the worse in regard to inmates’ conditions was presumably not unrelated
to a major review of the prison and camp system that was carried out in April 1961 –
the most immediately noticeable result of which was the scrapping of proposed plans
349
See Marchenko, My Testimony and A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 3, London:
Collins/Fontana, 1978.
350
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 3, p. 427 and p. 493. The difference in composition that
Solzhenitsyn referred to was that the majority of inmates during the Khrushchev years tended to be
from the Ukraine or the Baltic States rather than from Russia. This was largely a result of the fact that
most who had been arrested for nationalism were not included in the amnesties that drained the Gulag
of much of its population after Stalin’s death.
351
See, for example, Marchenko My Testimony, p. 209 and Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago Part 3, p.
501.
266
for an early release programme – a portent of things to come. 352 The most widely
cited indicator of this increasing persecution against ‘politicals’ came in a change to
the official classifications of camp regime in 1962. Four grades of confinement were
defined for prisoners: in ascending order of severity they were ‘normal’, ‘intensified’,
‘strict’ and ‘special’. Political prisoners immediately began their sentences on strict
regime and were liable to be ‘upgraded’ to special regime at the slightest infraction of
the rules. As Rasma Karklins noted: ‘the more severe the camp regime, the worse the
conditions and the harder the work’.353
The new guidelines issued in 1961 provided for 1.75 square metres of living space per
inmate and decreed an eight hour working day of heavy physical labour, although
Walter Connor has suggested that this was often prolonged beyond ten hours.
Prisoners’ daily lives were strictly regimented. Privileges, such as family visits and
food parcels could be withdrawn at the slightest sign of ‘failure to co-operate’ with
the camp administration, rations were kept only a little above starvation level and
criminal prisoners continued to be employed for the purpose of terrorising ‘politicals’,
though to nothing like the same extent as in previous years. 354
Whereas the second half of the 1950s had seen political prisoners scattered across a
range of camp complexes, the 1960s saw them increasingly concentrated in just three
locations: Mordova and Perm camps and Vladimir prison. These came to be the
regime’s preferred depositories for political prisoners right up until glasnost’ with
practically every prominent dissenter who was sentenced during the post-Stalin era
352
See Lewin, The Soviet Century, p. 160.
R. Karklins, ‘The Organisation of Power in Soviet Labour Camps’, Soviet Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2,
April 1989, p. 277.
354
See W. Connor, ‘The Soviet Criminal Correction System: Change and Stability’, Law and Society
Review, February 1972, pp. 368-390.
353
267
serving their sentence in one of the two camp complexes as well as a spell in Vladimir
prison at the start or end of their incarceration.
There is a wealth of evidence in this chapter which demonstrates a growing
conservatism and sense of continuity with the Brezhnev era. However, to see this as a
‘Brezhnevisation’ of the system may not be entirely accurate: primarily on the basis
that this pre-supposes a liberality during the Khrushchev years that did not exist in
this respect. In Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn suggested that conservatives had
discreetly brought pressure to bear on Khrushchev to tighten up the camp system, yet
one should not blindly accept this assertion. 355 The very same author had also written
that Khrushchev had been unaware that there were still political prisoners during his
period of rule – a statement that was almost certainly wrong. 356
When one looks to other fields, such as that of culture, it is quite clear that certain
powerful hardliners, like Party ideologist Mikhail Suslov and Central Committee
secretary Frol Kozlov, were occasionally able to exert a strong conservative influence
over Khrushchev, particularly after his perceived failure in the Cuban Missile
Crisis. 357 On the question of those who actively struggled against the regime, the
distinction between conservatives and liberals was not so great. Khrushchev did not
always have to be persuaded or suborned by conservatives before cracking down on
dissent.
Alongside this growing trend of harsh conservatism one can also see the emergence of
another scenario that was characteristic of the changing relationship between the
355
Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Part 3, p. 476.
See Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, Part 3, p. 476.
357
See A. Mikoyan, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniya o minuvshem, Moskva: Vagrius, 1999.
356
268
regime and dissenters. Although few inmates were fully aware of their legal rights
around this time, their complaints did not go entirely unnoticed. Physical abuse of
political prisoners became rare because of the risk of provoking intense protests
among their fellow ‘politicals’. In cases when news of these protests reached the
outside world it tended to trigger the intervention of higher authorities in Moscow and
result in the removal of those members of the camp administration deemed
responsible. 358
In this sense the greatest restraint upon the behaviour of camp
authorities was the fear that information would leak out into wider society and the
international arena. Again, this was clearly rationalisation instead of liberalisation.
4.3.3 REHABILITATION
Although it remained flawed, and tended to show preference to communists and camp
informers, the process of reviewing and re-evaluating dissenters’ convictions provides
a useful commentary on the period. It is instructive to return to the case of Yakov
Rizoi, a sovkhoz (state farm) chairman from Odessa. In September 1961 Rizoi had
been arrested after posting ‘slanderous’ leaflets attacking Party policy, calling on
workers to stand up for their rights and to demand an improvement in their standard of
living as well as sharply abusing Khrushchev. After he was uncovered as the source
of the leaflets, the KGB investigation against Rizoi also revealed that he had been a
dedicated CPSU member for twenty years and was twice decorated in the army but
had lost his job because of the military cutbacks in April 1958. Nonetheless, on 21
358
See Karklins, ‘The Organisation of Power’, p. 285.
269
December 1962 Rizoi was sentenced to seven years of corrective labour followed by
three years of internal exile – practically the maximum term allowed. 359
Rizoi immediately appealed against the judgement of the Odessa court and
subsequently had his case reviewed by the Ukrainian Supreme Court. The review
acknowledged that Rizoi was guilty of producing and distributing the documents in
question but argued that the original case had not established whether he had actually
intended to undermine the regime. Citing a line spoken by the defendant in court: ‘I
have never been an enemy of Soviet power. After we were demobilised it was a blow
to the heart, where I saw any kind of shortages I incorrectly understood this to be the
fault of improper policies by our leaders’, it was decided that there were no grounds
for considering Rizoi an ‘especially dangerous state criminal’.360 On 17 January
1963, less than a month after he had originally been convicted, the sentence handed
down by the Odessa oblast’ court was revoked by the Ukrainian Supreme Court and
Rizoi was freed.
This case demonstrates one of the most interesting facets of the authorities’ struggle
against dissent. Essentially, officials operating at lower levels of power, in this case
the Odessa oblast’ court, were less likely to respond to acts of dissent with any
notable lenience. Whether this was because the people who occupied these positions
were inherently more conservative in outlook or because they were ‘erring on the side
of caution’ is unclear, though it would seem that both may have played some part. It
has already been argued earlier in the present work that regional officials were
359
360
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 94020, ll. 1-4.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 94020, l. 6.
270
responsible for exacerbating the campaign attitude of 1957-1958 – something that a
number of authors have also suggested was the case in the Great Terror. 361
Looking at the theme of rehabilitation from a slightly wider perspective, there are two
striking trends that one immediately notices. The first is how few of the victims were
subsequently rehabilitated in the Gorbachev era and the second is how many were
either rehabilitated, reclassified or had their sentences reduced while Khrushchev was
still in power. 362 Those rehabilitated, for the most part, were people who had been
jailed during the campaign of 1957-1958 rather than across the period as a whole: a
tacit acknowledgement that errors had been made at that time.
The lack of
rehabilitations under Gorbachev was perhaps a result of the way in which the horrors
of the Stalin years were more fully exposed for the first time and occupied the public
and political mind during the glasnost’ era: a time when official discourse viewed
Khrushchev in a broadly positive light, particularly in comparison with his
predecessor and successor. 363
In regard to the second point, on rehabilitations that took place under Khrushchev,
there seems to have been little in the way of a discernable pattern or logic as to who
was and was not deemed worthy of rehabilitation. For example, the worker N.A.
Derzhavin of Osh oblast’ had been sentenced in May 1957 after repeatedly cursing
the regime and declaring his support for the Hungarian rising, yet was fully
rehabilitated as early as June 1958 while many hundreds who had committed what
361
See, for example, J. Getty and O. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-destruction of
the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2002.
362
See A. Yakovlev et al eds, Reabilitatsiya: Kak eto bylo Fevral’ 1956 – nachalo 80-x godov,
Moskva: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiya’, 2003.
363
See D. Nordlander, ‘Khrushchev’s Image in the Light of Glasnost and Perestroika’, Russian Review,
Vol.52, No.2, April 1993, pp. 248-264.
271
could be viewed as equal or lesser acts of protest received neither rehabilitation nor a
reduction in their sentence. 364
F.F. Shul’ts, for example, a pensioner and Party
member since 1919 who had been sentenced in March 1957 for sending critical letters
to Pravda, was not rehabilitated until June 1964. 365 This not only highlights the
element of unpredictability that remained within the system but probably also
demonstrates the fact that appeals could at times be stalled or blocked as a result of
resistance from various sources such as the security organs or the administration of
the relevant labour camp. 366
We know that there was considerable resistance from the KGB in regard to reevaluating cases against convicted dissenters. One example of this could be seen in a
letter written by the head of the Ukrainian KGB, V. Nikitchenko, in November 1960
to KGB chairman Aleksandr Shelepin complaining that the lack of unity between the
courts, Procurator and KGB meant that those who had been convicted were being
freed or having their sentences downgraded on appeal. 367 Shelepin then forwarded
the letter on to the Supreme Court demanding greater unity in combating dissent yet
was effectively rebuffed as the Court defended its right to re-evaluate cases that it
considered had been improperly conducted. Previous and subsequent confidential
memoranda on the theme of dissent repeatedly called for the courts, police and
investigating authorities to work more closely together, most likely meaning for them
to do as they were instructed by the KGB. Evidently the security organs were
uncomfortable operating within even the basic framework of a legal system.
364
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 78317, ll. 1-9.
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 74356, ll. 1-6.
366
See, for example, N. Adler, ‘Life in the ‘Big Zone’: The Fate of Returnees in the Aftermath of
Stalinist Repression’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1, January 1999, pp. 5-19 and Connor, ‘The
Soviet Criminal Correction System’.
367
GARF, f. 8131, op. 32, d. 6722, l. 142.
365
272
The number of people who were both sentenced for political crimes and subsequently
rehabilitated during the Khrushchev period was only a few dozen, rather than
hundreds or thousands, yet this is nonetheless a remarkable phenomenon which shows
that the Khrushchev years were rather unique in some respects.
As well as
rehabilitating many thousands of those who had been groundlessly repressed under
Stalin – a process that was, in fact, already tailing off in the early 1960s – the
Khrushchev regime also acknowledged its own mistakes and rehabilitated some of
those that it had repressed. This shows that the notion of strengthening socialist
legality was more than just empty rhetoric and that the authorities were genuinely
interested in seeing that those who were not ‘anti-Soviet’ were not treated as such.
What one quickly notices when looking at rehabilitations and sentence reductions of
those who had been convicted during the campaign against dissent was that they
almost all took place between August 1959 and April 1960. Exactly why the majority
of rehabilitations were processed during this period is somewhat unclear. One could
perhaps point to the dismissal of the notoriously hard-line Ivan Serov as KGB
chairman in 1958 or the fact that this was a time when Khrushchev’s power was least
fettered by conservatives within the leadership as being factors that had an influence
on this. However, in reality the timing of these re-evaluations may have been caused
by nothing more than the typically slow pace of the appeals process. What one can
safely infer is that this must have been a period when the relative influence of the
KGB and the legal establishment were more evenly balanced than was the case in
later years when the security organs enjoyed clear supremacy.
273
Finally, it is also worth reflecting on the question of how frequently the authorities
opted to circumvent the process of arrest and sentencing under the political articles of
the criminal code in favour of alternative charges such as hooliganism or parasitism.
Although it is possible to cite a handful of examples where this occurred, such as the
case against Joseph Brodsky, it is almost impossible to say anything concrete in
regard to the practice except that it did happen on occasion. For example, when
Aleksandr Ginzburg was arrested in 1959 it was, officially at least, not on account of
his having edited the underground literary journal Phoenix but on the basis that he had
fraudulently sat a university exam on behalf of a friend – something that he had
indeed done – even though the authorities well knew that Ginzburg had been involved
in compiling and distributing the samizdat poetry anthology Syntaxis. 368
Sources of information on Soviet political repression such as the Chronicle of Current
Events or research by Western journalists and academics were practically non-existent
at the time and official sources are likely to yield little. The practicalities of sifting
through an inestimable number of investigation protocols in order to find evidence of
cases where dissenters might have been sentenced under non-political articles make
such an operation a virtual impossibility.369 The admittedly limited primary evidence
available, such as Andrei Amalrik’s account of his own experience of being sentenced
under parasitism laws in 1965, seems to suggest that these articles did not ensnare
368
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 89189a, ll. 1-98
It is worthwhile to point out that the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), where the
Procurator archives are held, grants access to a maximum of five files (dela) per day and each file
catalogue (opis) provides no information other than the name of the sentenced individual. As such one
could conceivably work for months on end before finding a single example of political activity being
punished under non-political articles.
369
274
great hordes of dissenters, though as his own case demonstrated, they did undoubtedly
affect some. 370
4.4 PUNITIVE PSYCHIATRY
One of the less commonly acknowledged aspects of punitive policy against dissenters
in the Khrushchev period was that of psychiatric detention. It is, for example, a
practice that goes entirely unmentioned in numerous major works on Khrushchev and
his period. 371 Generally associated with the Brezhnev era, during which time it came
to be more widely employed and globally condemned, the practice of systematically
confining dissenters in psychiatric wards actually had very distinct roots in the late
1950s and early 1960s.
To give some idea of the extent to which the application of psychiatric punishment
against dissenters originated in the Khrushchev period, it is worthwhile to cite a few
facts from the Biographical Dictionary on Psychiatric Abuse in the USSR. 372 Several
of the most notorious institutions of the 1960s and 1970s including the Serbsky
Institute, Leningrad SPH (Special Psychiatric Hospital), Kazan SPH and Mordova
SPH, were already holding dissenters in the Khrushchev years. Practitioners such as
Daniil Lunts, Georgii Morozov, Andrei Snezhnevsky and numerous other
‘psychiatrist executioners’ were already becoming dominant in the field during the
370
See A. Amalrik, An Involuntary Journey to Siberia, Newton Abbot: Readers Union, 1971.
Among those works that entirely omit the theme of psychiatric repression are W. Taubman,
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2003; W. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political
Life, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
372
A. Koppers, ed. A Biographical Dictionary on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry in the USSR,
Amsterdam: International Association for the Political Use of Psychiatry, 1990.
371
275
period. 373 Finally, prominent Brezhnev era dissidents diagnosed as mentally ill under
Khrushchev
included
Vladimir
Bukovsky,
Aleksei
Dobrovolskii,
Natal’ya
Gorbanevskaya and Petr Grigorenko. A lack of reliable data on the subject makes it
impossible to say how many people were imprisoned in this way, but one can
probably assume that the total figure ran to hundreds at least.
Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin had actually experienced his first period of psychiatric
confinement in 1949 but this does not seem to have reflected any wider policy of
psychiatric imprisonment at that time. 374 Esenin-Volpin himself considered that it
was an act of mercy on the part of the diagnosing psychiatrist and one that ultimately
saved him from being sent to the Gulag – considered much worse than forced
hospitalisation during the Stalin era. 375
He may have received his first experience of psychiatric confinement under Stalin but
for Esenin-Volpin the Khrushchev years included three separate spells of psychiatric
incarceration in 1957, 1959 and 1962. 376 The first of his three spells of confinement
under Khrushchev was a result of advising an impressed French tourist against
applying for Soviet citizenship during the 1957 World Youth Festival. The second
came after he had refused to give evidence against a friend charged with treason and
the third came after his philosophical treatise A Leaf of Spring was smuggled abroad
and published in the West. 377
373
The label ‘psychiatrist-executioner’ was designated by a US Senate committee charged with
investigating accusations of psychiatric abuse against dissidents in the Soviet Union during 1972. See
Koppers, A Biographical Dictionary, p. 4
374
For the best overview of Esenin-Volpin, a man widely considered as the ‘father of the Soviet human
rights movement’ see Nathans, ‘The Dictatorship of Reason’.
375
Interview with Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin, Revere, Massachusetts, November 2006.
376
Esenin-Volpin was again confined to a psychiatric hospital in 1968 before eventually emigrating to
the US in 1972.
377
Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons, p. 67.
276
4.4.1 THE PARTY LEADERSHIP AND PUNITIVE PSYCHIATRY
That individuals at the highest level were aware of this general abuse of psychiatry in
this manner is undoubted, largely thanks to the efforts of Sergei Pisarev. Himself a
psychiatrist by profession, Pisarev had been arrested after writing to Stalin in order to
protest that the Doctors’ Plot was a fabrication. He was held first at the Serbsky
Institute in Moscow, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and then at
Leningrad Prison Psychiatric Hospital. 378 Upon being released after Stalin’s death,
Pisarev undertook to expose the use of punitive psychiatry and force the regime to
abandon the practice. After three years Pisarev’s efforts paid off and a commission
was established under A.I. Kuznetsov, a senior Central Committee official, to
investigate the accusation that the Serbsky Institute was being used to incorrectly
diagnose and imprison healthy people.
This commission appears to have been a sincere undertaking, made up as it was of
numerous eminent professors of psychiatry and directors of psychiatric institutions.
Pisarev’s allegations were found to have been correct and the commission concluded
that the process of diagnosing patients needed to be radically revised and that prisonpsychiatric hospitals should be transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs (MVD) to the Ministry of Health. 379 This seems to suggest that the
use of psychiatric confinement was initially a localised and unsanctioned
phenomenon.
378
Subsequently renamed as Leningrad Special Psychiatric Hospital.
C. Mee, The Internment of Soviet Dissenters in Mental Hospitals, Cambridge: John Arliss Limited,
1971, p. 3.
379
277
However, sources differ on what the ultimate outcome was: Fireside stated that the
main changes to the system which took place were cosmetic ones (such as changing
the names of institutions from Prison Psychiatric Hospitals to Special Psychiatric
Hospitals) while Alexeyeva has claimed that hundreds of those who had been
misdiagnosed were released and numerous ‘bad’ psychiatrists demoted. 380 With little
clarity in regard to the sources that either Alexeyeva or Fireside based their arguments
upon, one is forced to enter into a process of deduction relating to which of the two
was closer to the truth.
As someone who was deeply involved in the dissident movement and the struggle
against punitive psychiatry for many years prior to her emigration in 1977, one’s
inclination is to side with Alexeyeva. The fact that her version of events is contained
in what is still the benchmark work on Soviet dissent over twenty years after it was
first published further strengthens this inclination. However, Fireside’s version is
broadly supported by several other authors, such as Cornelia Mee and Peter
Reddaway. Furthermore, it is Fireside’s account that tallies most closely with what
we know of the Soviet regime, and as such his version of events is presumed to be the
more accurate of the two alternatives.
What all sources agree on is that the commission’s report was not considered by the
top Party leadership and its members were gradually removed from their positions. 381
Unfortunately punitive psychiatry in general, and during the Khrushchev years in
particular, is a subject where the availability of documentation is extremely limited
and we consequently know nothing of how and why the report was suppressed.
380
381
Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons, p. 38 and Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent, p. 311.
Mee, The Internment of Soviet Dissenters, p. 3.
278
Cornelia Mee has suggested that it was Viktor Churaev, at that time the head of the
RSFSR Department of Party Organs, who suppressed the findings of the report yet
she has given no indication as to why Churaev may have done so, or even how she
knew that he did. As such, one must treat this assertion with an element of caution.
Members of the leadership may have been unaware of the use of punitive psychiatry
in the early stages of the era but it seems clear that they knew of it by the turn of the
decade. The fact that the practice had gained a degree of approval at the highest level
could be seen when, in May 1959, Pravda made explicit the supposed link between
political non-conformity and mental illness: ‘…to those who start calling for
opposition to communism … we can say that now, too, there are people who fight
against communism…but clearly the mental state of such people is not normal’. 382
Clearly, one could not expect that everything contained in the pages of Pravda or any
other newspaper was precisely dictated by the highest authorities yet neither were
they in the habit of printing anything that might be considered objectionable by the
leadership.
Although conclusive evidence on the matter is yet to surface, it seems that there may
be a reasonable case for ascribing the growth of this practice to Khrushchev himself.
As a caveat to his numerous declarations that there were no longer any political
prisoners in the USSR, Khrushchev was known to remark that anyone dissatisfied at
the Soviet political system must by definition be mentally ill. 383 Whether this had
been intended as an off-the-cuff quip by the First Secretary or was a genuine signal to
those charged with policing dissent remains unclear. However, in a system where the
382
383
Pravda, 24 May 1959.
See, for example, Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, p. 155.
279
utterances of a single leader carried so much authority it seems doubtful that such
remarks would have been entirely inconsequential.
Most damning of all is the assertion by Vladimir Bukovsky that Khrushchev
personally ordered the psychiatric confinement of the writer Valery Tarsis in August
1962. 384 Tarsis’ crime had been to send his satirical novel The Bluebottle, which
contained an unflattering portrait of Khrushchev, to the United Kingdom for
publication earlier that year. 385 According to Bukovsky’s memoirs, the book was
shown to Khrushchev by one of his aides with the result that ‘he flew into a rage and
gave orders for Tarsis to be incarcerated in a lunatic asylum’. 386 That Khrushchev
was particularly sensitive to real or perceived insults against his person has been
extensively depicted by William Taubman and the fact that he had the capacity to ‘fly
off the handle’ has long been recognised as one of his personality traits. It is also true
that, while Khrushchev is often accepted to have been a fundamentally decent man at
a personal level, an overview of his career shows that he was nonetheless capable of
taking ruthless steps such as this. 387
Since Bukovsky is certainly not an impartial source on such matters, it should be
considered on what evidence this accusation was based.
The first point to be
established is that, although it was he who put the words into print, the accusation did
384
Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Cambridge, March 2007.
Tarsis made no secret of the fact that he had sent the work abroad and even refused to allow its
publication under a pseudonym, insisting that his real name be used. His subsequent experiences in
Kashchenko OPH (Ordinary Psychiatric Hospital) provided the basis for his next novel Ward 7 (the
title of which referred to Chekhov’s story Ward 6). See V. Tarsis, Ward 7: An Autobiographical
Novel, London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1965.
386
Bukovsky, To Build a Castle p. 194.
387
For example, it was Khrushchev who sanctioned the use of force against protesters in Hungary and
at Novocherkassk. His time as Stalin’s potentate in the Ukraine was also sufficiently bloody to earn
him the nickname ‘the Butcher of Kiev’. See, for example, Zh. Medvedev and R. Medvedev Nikita
Khrushchev: Otets ili otchim sovetskoi ‘ottepeli’, Moskva: Yauza, 2006.
385
280
not originate with Bukovsky but with Tarsis himself. Tarsis told Bukovsky that this
information had come from conversations with senior figures within the KGB who
were uneasy at detaining him in such a fashion. 388 As a reasonably prominent writer
it is entirely possible that Valery Tarsis would have been sufficiently well connected
for such a conversation to have occurred, and as a Soviet citizen with an international
profile one would not expect his case to have proceeded without at least having the
consent – or most likely, the active encouragement – of the leadership. Nonetheless,
considering the seriousness of the matter and the lack of conclusive evidence it is
important to present this as an allegation rather than a fact.
4.4.2 PROCESSES AND CONDITIONS
Scholars generally suggest that there was no totally reliable way to predict which
cases would ‘go the psychiatric route’. 389 This seems to be true, though one can point
to a relative wealth of cases in which individuals who criticised or lampooned
Khrushchev, as Tarsis had done, subsequently found themselves confined in
psychiatric wards.
Petr Grigorenko also fell into this category.
Although the
immediate cause of his arrest in March 1964 had been involvement in the
underground group ‘the Union of Struggle for the Restoration of Leninism’, the fact
that his initial break with the regime had come in a public speech denouncing the
burgeoning cult around Khrushchev, and the fact that members of the Central
Committee Presidium had apparently monitored the progress of his investigation,
388
Interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Cambridge, 2007.
See, for example, S. Bloch and P. Reddaway, Russia’s Political Hospitals, London: First Futura
Publications, 1978 and Fireside, Soviet Psychoprisons.
389
281
would suggest that the orders for his detention had come from ‘on high’. 390
Furthermore, whilst being held in Leningrad SPH, Grigorenko made the acquaintance
there of Yuri Grimm – one of the authors of several anti-Khrushchev leaflets
discussed in the previous chapter. 391
There were two ways for the authorities to initiate psychiatric repression: the first was
known as ‘criminal confinement’ and the second was ‘civil confinement’. The former
involved people who had been arrested by the KGB and were subsequently submitted
for ‘psychiatric evaluation’ during the course of their investigation and declared
mentally unsound. One example of this could be seen in the case against Yuri Belov,
a Russian tourist in Moscow who had been staying at the hotel Zarya during February
1962 where he had written anti-Soviet slogans on the door of the men’s toilet. He
later visited the Kremlin, again leaving hostile graffiti on a toilet door. 392 Belov was
quickly tracked down and an investigation was initiated. An entry in the case file
from 12 April simply stated that ‘in the course of this investigation doubts have arisen
regarding Belov’s psychiatric state’ and he was sent to the Serbsky Institute to be
assessed. The resulting evaluation stated that he was ‘unfit to be held responsible and
constitutes a social danger’: meaning he was to be detained in a psychiatric unit.393
It is possible that a few dissenters who were confined to psychiatric prisons in this
manner did have some kind of mental problems. Kasym Minibaev, for example, was
confined in an asylum after travelling from Frunze to Moscow, vaulting over a barrier
inside Lenin’s mausoleum and repeatedly kicking the glass case surrounding Lenin
390
See Grigorenko, Memoirs. Grigorenko was duly released from psychiatric incarceration shortly after
Khrushchev’s ouster. He was, however, confined again in 1969.
391
Grigorenko, Memoirs, p.329.
392
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 92580, ll. 1-3.
393
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 92580, l. 4.
282
until it broke. 394 One would struggle to argue that these were the actions of a rational
and healthy individual. Nonetheless, a huge wealth of evidence shows that most
diagnoses of psychiatric illness against dissenters were neither valid nor mistaken but
were deliberate and cynical attempts to silence critics.
In other cases, those who were imprisoned in this way had not even committed a
verifiable ‘crime’ before they were apprehended. Civil confinement was essentially
the equivalent of ‘sectioning’: forcibly removing an individual from society on the
basis that their behaviour constituted a danger to either themselves or those around
them. In many cases those who were held by civil commitment were kept in Ordinary
Psychiatric Hospitals (OPHs) which featured slightly less severe regimes than Special
Psychiatric Hospitals but were, nonetheless, harrowing. 395 Already open to abuse,
new guidelines for civil confinement were issued in 1961, entitled ‘Directives on the
Immediate Hospitalisation of Mentally-Ill Persons Who Are a Social Danger’. These
new guidelines contained sufficiently vague technical provisions and wording as to
allow practically untrammelled scope for the immediate and forcible incarceration of
anyone. 396 This piece of legislation undoubtedly facilitated countless instances where
healthy individuals were confined in asylums over the next three decades.
In SPHs conditions were often intolerably harsh; sometimes inmates were subjected to
forced medication and brutal treatment by orderlies (usually criminal prisoners
394
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 89189, ll. 1-16. According to the investigation protocol, Minibaev only
ended his attack when wrestled to the ground by guards on duty at the time.
395
Probably most famous instance in which this process was employed was in the confinement of
Zhores Medvedev at Kaluga in June 1970. His case quickly received vocal support from the likes of
Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (who famously labelled the practice ‘spiritual murder’) and
Petr Kapitsa. This in turn provoked widespread international condemnation and Medvedev was soon
released. For more details see R. Medvedev and Zh. Medvedev, A Question of Madness, New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1971.
396
Bloch, and Reddaway Russia’s Political Hospitals, p. 152.
283
themselves) and forced confinement among the genuinely and sometimes violently
insane. Even the most hardened dissenters held in this way generally succumbed to
pressure to repent. Devoid of practically all rights, entirely sealed off from the
outside world and without a defined period of imprisonment, it was entirely possible
for individuals never to emerge from such institutions or to do so only after their
health had been completely ruined.
There were many advantages for the authorities in branding critics mentally
unhealthy. It not only rejected the validity of dissenters’ criticisms but bypassed legal
procedural requirements and negated the need to establish evidence of any kind of
anti-Soviet activity. 397 This in turn meant that potentially embarrassing political trials
could be avoided – a not unimportant consideration while Khrushchev continued to
insist that there were no political prisoners in the USSR. Furthermore, because those
imprisoned in this way received a diagnosis rather than a sentence it was possible to
hold them indefinitely or, in many cases, until they recanted their former views and
behaviour. Even after their release, former psychiatric prisoners remained particularly
vulnerable; once diagnosed as suffering from mental illness they were liable to be
resubmitted for further treatment at the first sign of a ‘recurrence of their former
condition’. This tended to include brief periods of forced hospitalisation around
major public events and holidays.
The only potential drawback for the authorities lay in the practice being exposed.
This would mean widespread international opprobrium for the regime – something
that the Soviet authorities sought to avoid partly because of their burgeoning interests
397
See A. Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaya ‘ottepel’, Moskva: Olma Press, 2002.
284
around the world and partly because they were increasingly keen to be viewed as a
responsible and respectable international power. The biggest breakthrough in regard
to international awareness of the Soviet use of punitive psychiatry did not come until
the World Psychiatric Association condemned the Soviet regime for the practice in
1977, but the first cracks had begun to show even before Khrushchev’s ouster. 398 The
imprisonment of Valery Tarsis was one of the earliest cases to draw international
attention but even this had been proceeded by that of the writer Mikhail Naritsa who
was confined to Leningrad SPH in 1961 after his book The Unsung Song was
published in West Germany. 399
It is particularly important to note that this was not a practice to which all Soviet
psychiatrists acquiesced, but one that was concentrated around a small number of
individuals and institutions. Numerous cases arose where individual psychiatrists
resisted pressure from above and refused to diagnose healthy individuals as being
mentally unsound.
Aleksandr Ginzburg’s arrest in July 1960 featured such an
instance when, after refusing to plead guilty, he was instead sent for psychiatric
evaluation. After some time the case was directed back to the Procurator’s office
because the psychiatrists evaluating Ginzburg declared themselves unable to provide a
diagnosis of his being mentally unwell. 400
This demonstrates that the inner workings of the Soviet system were by no means
entirely monolithic and unquestioningly obedient. However, it must also be qualified
398
The resolution condemning the use of punitive psychiatry was passed at the Sixth World Congress
of Psychiatrists in Honolulu on 30 August 1977. The same debate had been raised six years earlier at
the organisation’s previous congress in Mexico City but had been dropped when Soviet delegates
threatened to walk out.
399
Naritsa was eventually freed in 1965.
400
GARF, f. 8131, op. 31, d. 89189a, ll. 7-10.
285
by pointing to the fact that pressure to acquiesce to the will of the authorities was no
longer so great as it had been a decade previously when the consequences of refusal
could have been fatal. Like scientists and jurists, Soviet psychiatrists could refuse to
bend to the authorities’ demands when professional considerations were at stake.
Nonetheless, when issues of medical efficacy thwarted the regime’s intention to
punish an individual, it remained possible for them to subvert proper and established
practices. Those who were initially spared a diagnosis of mental illness could still be
referred to ‘master case-makers’ such as Andrei Snezhnevskii or Daniil Lunts who
would invariably be able to ‘prove’ the existence of some condition or other. 401 Most
infamously, Snezhnevskii was known to diagnose an illness that he labelled ‘sluggish
schizophrenia’ which was a form of schizophrenia that he asserted could exist entirely
without observable symptoms.
Large-scale and random terror may have been abandoned but the regime remained
capable of immense cruelty against individual critics. Moreover, the fact that the
practice was carefully concealed from the Soviet and international public not only
shows the extent to which the authorities wished to avoid generating negative public
opinion at home and abroad but also that this was not intended to intimidate the wider
population into conformity but one that was intended to neutralise or remove the
threat posed by certain dissenters. Owing to the paucity of available documentation
this may eventually prove to be another field in which our current perceptions of the
Khrushchev era are significantly challenged if and when new sources come to light.
401
See, for example, Bloch and Reddaway, Russia’s Political Hospitals.
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4.5 CONCLUSIONS
The main trend that can be seen in regard to official responses to dissent during the
period in question is that those who were considered genuine enemies continued to be
forcefully suppressed while others were given the opportunity to abandon their former
behaviour. The struggle against dissent was no longer conducted on an ad hoc basis
in response to immediate challenges. Instead, this was a field in which an integrated
series of measures were put in place to stifle dissent and to maintain social order. The
Party and state leadership continued to dictate the tone of repression but it was the
KGB that tended to take the lead in policing dissent on a day-to-day basis.
Perhaps the most pertinent question relating to policies against dissent is to consider
whether they actually worked. On the level that the regime continued to rely on most
of the same policies and survived for over two and a half decades after Khrushchev’s
ouster – and indeed was not widely expected to fall when it eventually did – one must
accept that they were to a large extent successful.
They did not prevent the
development of a small but globally famous dissident movement within a few years of
Khrushchev’s departure, however. The main point in this respect is that the dissident
movement does not appear to have been particularly influential on public attitudes
inside the USSR, which was the regime’s overriding goal. 402
It is also useful to note in this respect that from the end of the 1950s the authorities’
actions demonstrated even more clearly that their goal was to stifle dissent and to
402
In respect of the dissident movement’s influence on Soviet society it is worth referring the reader
back to Alexei Yurchak’s research, cited earlier. However, Robert Horvath has shown that former
dissidents did have a considerable impact on the way that post-Soviet Russia was shaped. See A.
Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until it Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation, Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2006 and Horvath, The Legacy of Soviet Dissent.
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minimise its impact rather than to crush it decisively. The aim was to control people’s
behaviour rather than their ideological beliefs. There were new constraints upon the
authorities, such as the desire to minimise negative publicity abroad, but the main
reason for this unwillingness to take decisive steps for the eradication of dissent could
be found in the changed relationship between society and the regime. The authorities
had learned that society could be effectively controlled without recourse to the use of
large-scale repression and would, in all likelihood, respond negatively to any sign of
such a development.
After the summer of 1962 in particular, it had become
abundantly clear to the regime that there were limits of tolerance beyond which
society could not be pushed without risking a dangerous response. Public moods and
social passivity came to play an integral role in the authorities’ behaviour thereafter as
the era of stagnation approached.
Another of the themes that has been raised throughout this thesis is how the present
subject relates to the era’s reputation as one of ‘thaw’. The second half of the
Khrushchev period presents something of a contradictory picture. There were some
definite liberal episodes during the second half of the Khrushchev period, but they
were also offset by events and processes of startling conservatism. For example,
Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin at the XXII CPSU Congress in October 1961 came
shortly after a significant deterioration in conditions for political prisoners; the year
that Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich was published also witnessed the sentencing of
more than three hundred and twenty dissenters along with twenty four dead and over a
hundred wounded in the massacre at Novocherkassk. One must, therefore, exercise
considerable caution in depicting the second half of the Khrushchev era as a liberal
passage in Soviet history.
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One of the most notable points arising from the present chapter is the extent to which
the policies that were used to combat dissent during later years actually had very
distinct roots in the second half of the Khrushchev period.
Practices such as
psychiatric imprisonment, prophylaxis and ‘smearing’ dissenters in the media were
already being employed by the early 1960s, as were the laws under which dissenters
were convicted and the labour camps and regimes that existed into the Brezhnev era
and beyond. While still undeniably harsh, one can see that the transition away from
Stalinist methods of social control had progressed about as far as it ever would. The
combination of ‘soft’ measures, such as prophylaxis, and ‘hard’ measures, such as
imprisonment and psychiatric confinement was fundamentally established and lasted
almost until the eventual fall of the Soviet regime in 1991.
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CONCLUSION
Previous studies on the Khrushchev period have often failed to address the issue of
dissent, while studies on dissent have generally paid little attention to the events of the
Khrushchev era. In regard to the former, one can see this in the exaggerated notion of
the era as one of liberality and ‘thaw’. The latter can be seen in the way that
Alexeyeva, for example, depicted the dissenting activity of the Khrushchev years only
as an ‘incubation period’ for the subsequent human rights movement. 403 There is
undoubtedly some validity to both of these characterisations, yet they provide only a
partial view of events, as this thesis has shown.
Acts of political protest and criticism were far more frequent in number and more
diverse in form during the Khrushchev era than has previously been supposed, and the
authorities’ responses to dissent betrayed a much more limited degree of liberality
than one might expect. This was a period in which the Soviet regime faced its most
widespread domestic unrest between the late 1930s and the commencement of
glasnost’ in the 1980s. Furthermore, it was not just members of the intelligentsia who
criticised the regime. Dissenters came from all parts of the country and all social
classes at this time, though there was practically no unity among them.
The renunciation of mass terror meant that the authorities were forced to find new
ways of keeping society in check. From the uncertain and ad hoc policing of dissent
in the early Khrushchev years through to the variegated and precise methods of the
403
L. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. 269.
290
1960s, one can see that the regime steadily became more sure-footed and
sophisticated in suppressing dissenting behaviour. The range of acceptable criticism
had in fact expanded very little since the Stalin years and the main difference actually
lay in the manner of response that the authorities deemed appropriate.
5.1 KHRUSHCHEV AND THE KHRUSHCHEV ERA
As one of the most celebrated figures to emerge during the Khrushchev years, and
indeed during the entire Soviet period, it is instructive to consider Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s assessment of Khrushchev and his era: ‘historians attracted to the ten
year reign of Nikita Khrushchev…will inevitably be astounded to see how many
opportunities were briefly concentrated in those hands, and how playfully, how
frivolously they were used before they were nonchalantly tossed aside. Endowed with
greater power than anyone else in our history except Stalin…he used it like Krylov’s
Mishka in the forest clearing, rolling his log first this way, then that, all to no
purpose.’ 404
This assessment is, of course, inextricably tied in with its author’s own complex
relationship with the period, with Khrushchev himself and with the Soviet regime in
general.
Solzhenitsyn had spent the early post-Stalin years serving exile in
Kazakhstan and then risen to global fame after Khrushchev had personally sanctioned
the publication of Ivan Denisovich, but had also seen official favour quickly
disintegrate and ultimately found himself out in the cold before Khrushchev was even
404
A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 3, London: Collins/Fontana, 1978, p. 492. Ivan
Krylov was a renowned writer of Russian fables involving animals. ‘Mishka’ refers to an ‘industrious
bear’ in one of Krylov’s fables.
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ousted from power. 405
Nonetheless, aside from the ‘baggage’ that accompanies
Solzhenitsyn’s evaluation of Khrushchev and his period, this is an assessment that
broadly reflects the views of many commentators.
Essentially, what Solzhenitsyn meant was that Khrushchev had the chance to effect
real change in the Soviet system but failed to do so – especially in respect of
liberalisation. 406 There is an element of truth in this, yet the case is not so ‘black and
white’ as Solzhenitsyn typically suggested.
The Khrushchev years continued to
witness some harsh state repression against Soviet citizens but it was neither of the
scale or the severity of that which occurred under Stalin. Not only had random terror
been brought to an end but, by the 1960s in particular, the likelihood was that
dissenters would be warned or otherwise intimidated by the state as a first line of
response, instead of simply being jailed – or worse. The regime did show a greater
inclination to act roughly within its own laws for the majority of the time, though it
also reserved the prerogative to sweep aside practically all other considerations and to
respond ruthlessly to critics on occasion, particularly if domestic stability were
deemed to be under threat.
However, it is important to note that, contrary to the assumption often inherent in
criticism of his uneven record of liberalisation, Khrushchev was not a ‘liberal’ in the
full sense of the word. The fact that he exposed and reined in many of the worst
405
The most compelling evidence of Solzhenitsyn’s declining favour in official circles could be seen in
the concerted drive that was undertaken to ensure that he did not win the 1964 Lenin Prize for
literature, despite the global acclaim for Ivan Denisovich and the support of prominent cultural figures
such as Novyi Mir editor Aleksandr Tvardovsky and film director Mikhail Romm. See M. Scammell,
Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1984, p. 481 or M. Zezina, Sovetskaya
khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya i vlast’ v 1950e-60e gody, Moskva: Dialog MGU, 1999, p. 261.
406
We know this was on Solzhenitsyn’s mind from the opening line of the next paragraph: ‘he never
carried anything through to its conclusion – least of all the fight for freedom!’. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag
Archipelago, Vol. 3, p. 492.
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excesses of his predecessor has, to some extent, obscured that point. In this case the
term ‘liberal’ has to be understood in a relative sense. For example, it has been
demonstrated at numerous points throughout this thesis that he was not only an
inconsistent force for liberalisation but also capable of sanctioning harsh repressive
measures against dissenters himself.
Furthermore, issues such as genuine
democratisation and freedom to criticise the regime were little short of anathema to
Khrushchev’s political beliefs. As he himself was known to acknowledge from time
to time, decades of Stalinism had taken deep roots in Khrushchev’s political outlook.
Historians have spent many years addressing myriad facets of the Stalin regime’s
repressive activity. Under Brezhnev this was a task that was undertaken by political
scientists, Western journalists and organisations such as Amnesty International at the
time that persecution took place. 407 For the Khrushchev years there simply has not
been anything like the same volume of work carried out on this subject. This could
mean that notions of Khrushchev as a liberal leader and of his era as one of ‘thaw’
may require a thoroughgoing reassessment as and when a more in-depth view of
repression during the era is formed.
Western historians have, it seems, overwhelmingly formed their evaluations of the
period and of Khrushchev on the basis of comparison with the regime’s past and
future. In many ways this is a very useful approach – and one that would obviously
depict Khrushchev in a positive light – but it does not necessarily give a fully rounded
picture. For this, one must complement and qualify such an approach with a wealth of
407
Two of the most notable political scientists who consistently publicised various of the regime’s
abuses were Peter Reddaway and Frederick Barghoorn . Some of the journalists who became most
closely associated with the Soviet dissidents were George Krimsky (an Associated Press journalist who
was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1977), Robert Toth (of The Los Angeles Times) and David
Bonavia (of The Times).
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detail specific to the time and the individual in question. In addition, one must
acknowledge, as historians generally do, that Khrushchev was in many ways a
contradictory figure and the period was a time of great political and social
oscillation. 408 One of the best examples of this could be seen in the fluctuating
number of people who were sentenced for political crimes from one year to the next.
With the Khrushchev era increasingly attracting the attention of historians, it is now
important to question some of the long-standing assumptions that have been made
about the period. The impact of the Secret Speech in particular requires a little demystifying. For example, this thesis has shown that, in the short term at least, the
Soviet invasion of Hungary actually produced a much more vociferous response than
did the Secret Speech. It must be restated, however, that impassioned reactions to
events in Hungary were partly a result of hopes that had been raised by the XX
Congress.
Furthermore, the Secret Speech did not signal the beginning of a more tolerant
attitude toward criticism of the authorities. Firstly, the number of people being
sentenced under article 58-10 had already dropped to only a few hundred per year
during the years of collective leadership. Secondly, the relative leniency of the
immediate post-XX Congress period can be at least partly attributed to widespread
uncertainty on the part of those who were expected to police dissent within the Party
and Komsomol. Finally, less than one year after Khrushchev’s indictment of Stalin
408
Among these changes, one could mention the fact that the Khrushchev years witnessed the point at
which the urban population finally overtook that of the countryside, steeply rising education levels
among the population and rapidly growing Party membership or the process of releasing a huge volume
of Gulag inmates.
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was delivered, the Soviet leadership had signalled the beginning of a major
clampdown on dissent.
The theme of how people related to Khrushchev as a leader is a particularly
interesting one. We have seen in chapter 3 that Ludmilla Alexeyeva came to admire
Khrushchev after his ouster but had found him boorish and objectionable at the time.
Vladimir Bukovsky too recalled that he had ‘detested’ Khrushchev while he was in
power but went on to view him in a slightly more positive light afterward. 409 One
ought not to assume that the activities of dissenters were always an accurate reflection
of the popular mood yet this theme of criticism was so marked that it should not be
ignored. The evidence presented in this thesis shows that there was some particularly
sharp opposition to Khrushchev during his time as First Secretary.
This stands in great contrast to the generally positive accounts of Khrushchev and the
Khrushchev era that have been provided by many historians. One can point to a wide
range of reasons why such a divergence of opinion exists. It is undoubtedly true that
historians now have access to information which was unavailable to Soviet citizens at
the time and that the ability to view both the man and the period in a wider historical
context can give a more rounded picture. 410 However, that argument can also be
turned around to say ‘this is how it was for us at the time’ – a similarly valid point.
After all, one usually does not live from day to day in the wider context of history and
nor can one make allowances for a future that has not yet happened. As such, the
present work has tried to look at the question of dissenting behaviour not just in
regard to the ‘bigger picture’ but also as it happened at ground level.
409
V. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, p. 113.
Nonetheless, access to archival sources on the Khrushchev period remains rather patchy in parts,
especially in relation to the work of the KGB.
410
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Bearing in mind the apparently small number of people who were directly involved in
the dissident movements of the Brezhnev years, it is somewhat startling to see how
many citizens engaged in quite serious dissenting behaviour under Khrushchev. For
example, referring back to the section on prophylaxis in the previous chapter, a July
1962 KGB report stated that almost seven hundred people were traced as the authors
of anti-Soviet leaflets in the first half of that year. The same report then stated that
sixty anti-Soviet groups had been uncovered already that year, including a total of
over two hundred participants. 411 A subsequent report sent a year later said that
almost four hundred people had been traced for producing leaflets in the first five
months of 1963. 412 Taken together, these figures add up to approximately 1,300 active
dissenters who were traced by the KGB over an eleven month period alone. It is
again worthwhile to point out that these were cases that the security organs had
actually uncovered, rather than all instances of such activity. Clearly then, we are
looking at a phenomenon that involved thousands of people.
One of the key reasons for the growth of protest and criticism under Khrushchev was
the fact that, even though it remained considerable, the price to be paid for dissenting
behaviour had dropped significantly. This was perhaps the Secret Speech’s greatest
impact. However, this decline in fear was a development that facilitated protest and
criticism rather than provoked it outright. From the XX Congress onward, one can
look to a multitude of short and long-term catalysts for dissenting behaviour,
including disagreement with individual policies and opposition to specific members of
the leadership, poor handling of legitimate grievances about living standards, through
to a deeper sense of resentment at the failings and injustices of the regime.
411
412
RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 1, l. 2.
RGANI, f. 89, op. 51, d. 1, ll. 1-4 and f. 5, op. 30, d. 454, l. 110.
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In essence, protest over material problems, such as goods shortages and low wages,
was most liable to occur among workers and to be rather ephemeral in nature, even
though it could be quite vociferous in tone.
Although manifested in political
language, such as attacks on Khrushchev or criticism of Soviet aid to client states, this
kind of dissenting behaviour can be largely seen as ‘lashing out’ at authority and
generally did not imply a fundamental rejection of the communist system. By the end
of the 1950s the Soviet authorities had come tacitly to accept this point and
understood that, with a sophisticated system of social control in place, only minimal
pressure was usually required in order to force discontented elements back into line.
After the disorders of summer 1962 in particular, when the link between social
stability and living standards was made glaringly obvious, the regime largely ‘bought
off’ discontent among the working class until the failing economy no longer enabled
them to do so.
Less liable to result in volatile manifestations of anger than worker protest,
intelligentsia dissent posed more fundamental questions of the regime; initially in
regard to the prevailing interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and in later years
increasingly of communist ideology itself. These were precisely the kind of attitudes
that the Soviet authorities had in mind when they spoke of the need to identify
whether an individual was ‘truly anti-Soviet’. Of course, many of those who the
authorities still labelled ‘anti-Soviet’ did not consider themselves in this way at all –
showing that although the nature of social control had indeed become far more
rational and less brutal, it remained fundamentally intolerant of heterodoxy, especially
in the public sphere. Protest and criticism rooted in discontent at strictly political
issues, such as desire for greater democratisation, were not so easily bought off as
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were most workers’ complaints but instead had to be intimidated into silence or else
harshly punished with camp sentences and psychiatric imprisonment. It was from this
environment that the human rights movement of the Brezhnev years principally
emerged.
5.2 STATE AND SOCIETY
One can see that the relationship between state and society was changing significantly
during the early Khrushchev years in particular, before settling down again in the
1960s. The regime communicated to society through newspaper articles, speeches
and various other avenues, what had and had not changed since Stalin’s death in
regard to the boundaries of permissible and impermissible behaviour. Society then
communicated the same information to the authorities, primarily by acts of protest,
and a new set of ‘ground rules’ was gradually and implicitly established between the
two. Although still very much weighted in its favour, the balance of power in the
relationship shifted away from the state slightly during the Khrushchev era. It had
become clear that the aspirations and frustrations of society could no longer be all but
ignored and to do so would ultimately be at the regime’s peril.
The early part of the Khrushchev period, and also the preceding three years of
collective leadership, witnessed a considerable degree of uncertainty and
apprehension in the way that the authorities related to society. Even during Stalin’s
last years it was becoming clear to his successors that the system could not go on in
the same brutal manner indefinitely.
Stalin’s death, the Secret Speech and the
Hungarian rising were all points where members of the leadership voiced fears that
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the regime could be in danger of a major revolt from below. This was reflected in the
inconsistent and panicked ‘fire-fighting’ approach to policing dissent that was
employed in the early years as the authorities tried to work out how to maintain
effective social control without reliance on the kind of mass repression that would
most likely have further antagonised society.
Perhaps the most significant change in the relationship between state and society
came after this uncertain situation began to stabilise. From the end of the 1950s
onwards, one can argue that the authorities no longer sought to control the private
thoughts of its citizens but instead tried only to control their public behaviour. 413 That
the regime sought to manage dissenting behaviour rather than to eradicate it has been
raised at several points throughout the present work. The clearest indication of this
trend can be seen in the extent to which prophylactic measures became far more
common than a directly punitive approach in official responses to dissent.
This situation lasted virtually until the collapse of the Soviet regime, it went hand-inhand with the stagnation of the Brezhnev years and saw the regime sacrifice its
original raison d’être (building communism) in order to maintain power. For society
at large, material factors increasingly took precedence over political ones as personal
concerns rose at the expense of wider social issues. 414 Although effectively anathema
to the construction of communism, the authorities implicitly accepted this situation
and even used it to their advantage on occasion – arguably because they had no other
option if they wanted to maintain social stability. In return they demanded only
413
See V. Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin
Russia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 32.
414
See for example, Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life and E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy
1945-1964, Moskva: Izdatel’skii tsentr ‘Rossiya molodaya’, 1993.
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public obedience and a few basic demonstrations of loyalty such as participation in
elections and outward hostility toward the West. With the exception of a relatively
small band of dissidents, this is how the relationship between state and society
remained for much of the next three decades.
In general, there is little evidence that any popular desire for revolution or mass unrest
existed, with the possible exception of the few days immediately after the June 1962
price rises. Indeed, it is possible that the disturbances of summer 1962 could well
have been much more serious if the authorities had not acted quickly to ensure that
protests remained localised and information on what had happened at Novocherkassk
did not reach the wider population. What we have seen at various points in this thesis
is that among workers practically any cause of anger was liable to be reflected in quite
sharp political statements and behaviours. The first reason for this – most common
among camp and prison inmates – was the fact that political statements would cause
the authorities greatest offence. The second reason was the highly politicised nature
of everyday life, which meant that political language and imagery were always liable
to come to the surface in times of anger.
By looking at the subject through the medium of dissenting behaviour, we can draw
some useful outlines of the way that people related to the Soviet state and to MarxistLeninist ideology. The question of how far the opinions of dissenters represented
those of wider society is an important subject to address in this respect, but without
access to reliable data on public opinion one must be cautious in drawing any
sweeping conclusions. However, the fact that dissenters were drawn from practically
all social strata and geographical regions does imply that these were not the
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complaints of a small section of the population as was sometimes the case with
Brezhnev era dissidents. Furthermore, most dissenters were not genuine opponents of
the regime – and many were in fact dedicated communists – showing that these were
‘ordinary’ members of society in most respects.
The indications are that the XX CPSU Congress re-ignited a sense of utopianism
among many young people in particular, but the stimulus for reform that it had created
soon faded in the face of conservative resistance. As the era progressed one can
witness a marked process of decline in idealistic enthusiasm for communism as
criticism began to spread from policies in force and specific abuses of power, to the
Party leadership and then, by the middle of the 1960s, began to look to political
philosophies that entirely rejected the existing regime. This could be seen in the
growing popularity of Milovan Djilas’ work, for example. Although this by itself
does not prove that idealism and communist zeal were waning throughout society as a
whole, it does offer some support for the general hypothesis that communist
utopianism was increasingly subsumed by cynicism in the Brezhnev era.
Perhaps the most interesting point on the question of the regime’s legitimacy in the
eyes of dissenters was that most did not disagree with the general principles and goals
that the regime professed to stand for. Lenin remained almost entirely untouched by
criticism throughout the entire period, for example. In the early part of the period one
finds that most dissenters felt that the problems of the regime could be ‘fixed’ but
later years saw a growing body of opinion that the situation had become irreparable
and required a whole new start – although one that was still based upon the principles
of socialism in many cases.
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The majority of dissenters were neither in favour of revolution nor were they
outwardly opposed to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism. However,
the signs are that popular respect for the regime was deteriorating. According to
Elena Zubkova, by the end of the period, most people had stopped believing what was
said by Khrushchev and his government. 415 Many of the leaflets and comments cited
throughout in the present work strongly support Zubkova’s assertion. This was a
trend that seems to have continued throughout the rest of the post-Stalin era and
heightened the extent to which the regime’s legitimacy became dependent not on
ideological credibility but upon its capacity to provide an acceptable standard of
living.
The final major point to emphasise in respect of the changing relationship between
society and the regime under Khrushchev was the way that the outside world, and the
West in particular, came to occupy a position of growing significance in the actions of
both sides. It was not yet the intermediary between dissenters and the regime that it
became in the Brezhnev years, but if one were to compare the situation with the Stalin
era, when the Soviet Union was almost entirely sealed off from the outside world, the
scale of this change soon becomes apparent.
One of the most significant developments in this respect was the regime’s growing
interest in courting international public opinion, something that helped to restrain the
authorities’ more repressive tendencies. Furthermore, although scholars will have
long been aware that outside powers were engaged in some degree of agitation against
415
Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, p. 177.
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the Soviet regime, this thesis has shown that organisations such as NTS, Radio
Liberty and the Chinese government all expended considerable effort and resources
on exacerbating tensions within the USSR. Even though it consistently overstated the
role of foreign subversion, the Soviet regime was quite correct to assert that outside
powers were attempting to take advantage of its domestic tensions.
Contrary to the expectations of the authorities, rather than thanks to their efforts at
forestalling such a problem, foreign attempts to stir unrest in the USSR often fell on
stony ground. However, Western broadcasts and greater contact with foreigners did
contribute to steadily eroding the regime’s credibility in the eyes of its citizens by
exposing the extent of its hypocrisy and deceit. Furthermore, they also contributed to
the opening up of new philosophical avenues that had long since been sealed off by
the Soviet regime, and thus exacerbated the decline of belief in communism among
dissenters.
5.3 CHANGE AND CONTINUITY
As this thesis has consistently demonstrated, neither dissenting behaviour nor the
authorities’ responses to it were static phenomena but instead evolved throughout the
period, often in response to each other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one can see elements
of both the Stalin era and the Brezhnev years in the acts of protest and criticism that
occurred and in official responses to them. The most noticeable trend when one looks
at the ‘bigger picture’ is that of change from the Stalin era and continuity into the
Brezhnev era. In regard to dissent this can be seen in the way that more considered
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and purposeful criticism developed while isolated outbursts of hooligan-type
behaviour seem to have declined markedly by the end of the Khrushchev period.
The general characterisation of the Khrushchev years as having consisted of a more
liberal early period and an increasingly conservative second half finds both support
and contradiction in the evidence presented in this study. 416
The late 1950s in
particular proved to be something of a ‘mixed bag’ in this respect. If one looks at the
data on convictions under article 58-10 during the second half of that decade, they
were immeasurably lower than they had been during the Stalin years yet they were
also considerably higher than any subsequent period of Soviet history. Furthermore,
it is worth restating that developments such as reducing the powers of the security
organs and curtailing mass repression had actually begun during the years of
collective leadership rather than during Khrushchev’s time as the dominant leader. In
other words, the supposed ‘thaw era’ was not some kind of liberal oasis sandwiched
between two periods of arch-conservatism.
The evidence of growing conservatism in official policy against dissenters is not hard
to find during the early 1960s. One can cite examples such as worsening conditions
for political prisoners, legal reforms that expanded the scope for psychiatric detention
and the allocation of greater resources and influence for the KGB. However, we can
also see that a growing majority of those who were found to have been involved in
dissenting activity were no longer arrested and sent to camps but were dealt with
administratively instead. Nonetheless, a reversion to a far harsher means of dealing
with critics was always possible. This could be seen throughout the campaign against
dissent, in the rising at Novocherkassk and in the psychiatric confinement of
416
One encounters this broad periodisation in numerous secondary sources. See, for example, W.
Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, London: Free Press, 2003 and R. Medvedev and Zh.
Medvedev, Nikita Khrushchev: Otets ili otchim sovetskoi ‘ottepeli’, Moskva: Yauza, 2006.
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dissenters.
Khrushchev himself summed up the position most eloquently when,
during a harangue delivered to a gathering of intelligentsia figures in March 1963, he
enquired menacingly of his audience: ‘what, do you think we’ve forgotten how to
arrest people?’ 417
Even allowing for the above failings in the above periodisation’s consistency, this
division of Khrushchev's rule into 'liberal' and 'conservative' parts is largely consistent
with the 'dynamic' and 'stable' paradigm that has emerged in this thesis. The liberal
period can be seen as dynamic because it was then that long-standing policies and
practices of harsh social control were being abandoned or adapted to the new postStalin environment.
Similarly, one can hardly separate the two notions of
conservatism and stability, especially in regard to the Soviet domestic scene from
around the mid-1960s onwards.
In regard to dissenting behaviour, one can draw strong continuities between the
worker dissent of the Stalin era and that of the Khrushchev period as well as between
the intelligentsia dissent that emerged under Khrushchev and the human rights
movement of the Brezhnev years. Sarah Davies’ examples of voters writing ‘Trotsky’
on their ballot paper in the late 1930s or daubing swastikas on walls are thematically
consistent with outbursts calling for communists to be killed ‘like in Hungary’ or with
prisoners declaring their support for figures such as President Eisenhower or Mao-Tse
Tung. 418 For the most part, these acts were meant to offend the authorities rather than
to elicit any kind of real change and were ultimately of little or no consequence unless
417
S. Volkov, The Magic Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, New
York: Alfred Knopf, 2008, p. 207.
418
See S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia.
305
they reached some kind of ‘critical mass’. The extent to which these behaviours
appear to have tailed off during the 1960s, as living standards began to approach
something like an acceptable level for most citizens, is particularly indicative of their
link with material shortcomings.
One of the themes that can be traced throughout the course of the present work has
been the extent to which the struggle between dissenters and authority that took place
in the Brezhnev years had its roots in the Khrushchev era. Most of the principal
characters on both sides of the struggle were already in place for some time before
Khrushchev was removed from power. Lessons that were learned in the 1950s and
1960s – such as the intelligentsia’s rejection of underground activity in favour of
legalistic struggle and the authorities’ pioneering of prophylaxis – were to play a
notable role in the way that both sides conducted themselves during the later 1960s
and throughout the 1970s. One would be on unsafe ground to assert that the dissident
movement of the Brezhnev era was caused by what had taken place under
Khrushchev, but it would surely be correct to assert that this recent past had a major
influence on the way that the confrontation between dissidents and the regime was
subsequently played out.
A hypothesis that has been gaining some credibility over recent times has been to
suggest that in the last couple of years before he was removed from power,
Khrushchev had been effectively out-manoeuvred and neutered by conservatives
within the leadership and the bureaucracy, prompting a ‘Brezhnevisation’ of the
306
system even while Khrushchev remained First Secretary. 419 It is, however, worth
pointing out that this is not a universally accepted argument – Sergei Khrushchev in
particular was entirely unconvinced by it. 420
This thesis offers support for the
suggestion that one can discern a growing conservatism within the ruling apparatus
for some time prior to Khrushchev’s ouster yet it also raises the question as to whether
this ought to be viewed as ‘Brezhnevisation’.
The continuities in state activity against dissenters across the eras of Khrushchev and
Brezhnev were huge; practically all of the foundations for the persecution of
dissidents in the 1960s, 70s and 80s had been laid during Khrushchev’s tenure as First
Secretary, but by no means entirely during his last few years in power. The fact that
more dissenters were jailed during 1957 and 1958 than at any other time since Stalin’s
death demonstrates this succinctly. The question this begs is whether scholars are too
readily accepting the paradigm which states that Khrushchev was a liberal leader and
Brezhnev was a conservative one; implying that growing conservatism must,
therefore, be a consequence of ‘Brezhnevisation’.
In some respects this is an
unhelpful over-simplification. In reality, Khrushchev’s overthrow initially seemed to
offer the prospect of further liberalisation, though this did not turn out to be the case
in the long run.
Looking at the matter from this perspective prompts one to ask the question of
whether one can indeed see a ‘Brezhnevisation’ of the system during the late
Khrushchev period or whether growing conservatism was part of a policy trajectory
that was already mapped out during his earlier years in power. Pivotal developments
419
See, for example, V. Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 77.
420
Interview with Sergei Khrushchev, Rhode Island, November 2006.
307
in policy formulation, such as the campaign against dissent and the pressure from the
legal establishment that brought it to an end, had actually taken place by the end of the
1950s and were thereafter honed but not fundamentally altered. As such, it seems
that, in respect of policy against dissent at least, one cannot discern a marked process
of ‘Brezhnevisation’ during the late Khrushchev period.
5.4 THEMES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
With a growing number of scholars now looking at the Khrushchev period and a large
volume of sources still to be tapped into, this is undoubtedly a subject that holds great
potential for future research. Aside from archival materials accessible in Russia, a
wealth of additional documents have become available in Georgia in recent times, to
add to the large volume of declassified papers that exist in former Soviet republics
such as Ukraine and the three Baltic States.
Among the subjects that have been raised in this thesis, a number stand out as being
particularly worthy of future study. The subversive activity of NTS – such as sending
agents and propaganda materials across the Soviet border – and the Chinese regime’s
anti-Soviet agitation would make fascinating smaller research projects with a
significance that transcends the history of the Soviet regime alone. Larger studies
with the potential to contribute significantly to our understanding of the Soviet
regime, and particularly in regard to the relationship between state and society under
Khrushchev, include focusing more closely on the changing dynamics of underground
group activity, the domestic impact of Western radio broadcasts to the USSR,
308
changing attitudes toward Marxist-Leninist ideology and the use of prophylactic
measures against dissenters.
The latter of these subjects could prove to be the most revealing of all, if and when
relevant documentation that is presently held in the KGB and Presidential Archives is
made available to researchers. It would give an even greater insight into the scale of
protest and dissent that took place all across the USSR from the second half of the
Khrushchev era onwards and may well provoke a significant reassessment of the way
that historians view the domestic tensions facing the Soviet authorities in its later
years and perhaps even add a new dimension to the way that we view the eventual fall
of the regime in 1991.
309
APPENDIX 1
ANNUAL CONVICTIONS FOR POLITICAL CRIMES
Year
Article 58-10/
Article 190
Articles 70 and 72
1956
384
-
1957
1,964
-
1958
1,416
-
1959
750
-
1960
162
-
1961
207
-
1962
323
-
1963
341
-
1964
181
-
1965
20
-
1966
48
-
1967
38
65
1968
54
75
1969
72
123
1970
83
121
1971
66
102
1972
68
115
1973
73
105
1974
47
131
310
1975
22
74
1976
5
55
1977
6
54
1978
12
44
1979
4
65
1980
35
67
1981
39
88
1982
26
69
1983
44
119
1984
25
57
1985
16
57
1986
11
17
1987
1
6
Total
6, 543
1,609
Article 58-10 of the RSFSR criminal code – superseded in 1959 by articles 70 and 72
– dealt with anti-Soviet activity and propaganda aimed at undermining or
overthrowing the Soviet regime.
Article 190 dealt with materials ‘defaming the Soviet state and social system’. Most
commonly this was employed against individuals who produced and distributed
samizdat literature. The article was added to the RSFSR criminal code shortly after
the January 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel when the authorities had struggled to
prove that the pair had actually intended to undermine the Soviet regime.
311
APPENDIX 2
LIST OF INTERVIEWEES
Bukovsky, Vladimir – Cambridge – March 2007
Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the most renowned dissidents of the Brezhnev era and
was repeatedly imprisoned by the authorities. He was eventually expelled from the
USSR in December 1976 in a prisoner exchange for the Chilean communist leader
Luis Corvalan.
Daniel, Aleksandr – Moscow – May 2008
Aleksandr Daniel is the son of the famous dissidents Yuli Daniel and Larissa Bogoraz.
He is also the head of the Moscow branch of Memorial and a renowned scholar of
Soviet dissent.
Esenin-Volpin, Aleksandr – Revere – November 2008
Aleksandr Esenin-Volpin is the son of the celebrated poet Sergei Esenin. A
mathematician by profession, he is widely referred to as ‘the father of the Soviet
human rights movement’. Repeatedly subjected to psychiatric confinement, EseninVolpin emigrated to the United States in May 1972.
Grigorenko, Andrei – New York City – October 2006
Andrei Grigorenko is the son of the late Petro Grigorenko and was an active dissident
in his own right. He emigrated from the USSR in the late 1970s and now heads the
Petro Grigorenko Foundation in New York.
Litvinov, Pavel – New York City – December 2006
Pavel Litvinov is the grandson of famous Soviet diplomat, Maxim Litvinov. He was a
participant in the famous ‘Demonstration on Red Square’ and co-authored ‘An
Appeal to World Public Opinion’ with Larissa Bogoraz. After a period of exile in
Chita he left the Soviet Union in 1974.
312
Medvedev, Zhores – London – March 2007
Zhores Medvedev is the brother of historian Roy Medvedev – with whom he has coauthored several volumes on Soviet history – and a prominent biologist. He was
temporarily confined to a psychiatric institution in 1970 and later expelled from the
Soviet Union in 1973.
Orlov, Yuri – Ithaca – December 2006
Yuri Orlov was a co-founder of the Soviet branch of Amnesty International in October
1973 and later created the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group in 1976. After being jailed
in 1978 Orlov was freed and expelled from the USSR in 1986.
313
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